Commissioners get education in opioids, soil conservation

The Carlton County board is often audience to presentations on everything from treating invasive spongy moths to what the county's housing needs look like.

Recently, the board heard a pair of presentations from local officials: an annual report from the Carlton Soil and Water Conservation District on April 2 at the committee of the whole meeting, and another April 9 about how the county is spending its portion of opioid settlement money.

The information-gathering sessions proved fruitful, presenting the board with deeper understandings of how the money is flowing related to those endeavors and what the funding is yielding.

In the case of the opioid settlements - ongoing sums of money yielded from state lawsuits against makers and distributors who caused the opioid crisis - the county spent about $201,000 in the first non-calendar year of having settlement money, and was set to begin this month programming an additional $233,000 coming in a second phase of funding.

"This isn't taxpayer money," Carlton County public health educator Alli Bachinski said April 9. "This is settlement money from pharmaceutical companies that were in the lawsuits."

Bachinski outlined a slew of programs being buoyed by the dollars. Most of the programs fall under the headings of treatment or prevention. For instance, one program provided rides for people in recovery who needed to get to treatment, medical appointments and community events. A local taxi company was invoiced and paid on the back end for providing the rides.

"This program really filled a gap for people in recovery," said Bachinski, who outlined how transportation is a desperate need in the county.

"We need to do some really deep planning on transportation," she said, describing how rideshare programs such as Lyft and Uber are both costly and few and far between locally.

With funding from local opioid dollars, Recovery Alliance Duluth was able to meet with 409 individuals in recovery in Carlton County, including 118 in the jail, connecting them to events and recovery-based outings, such as barbecues and movies, that help support people in recovery.

Future spending will include grants to the eight school districts in Carlton County. Each will be eligible for up to $5,000, and will need to apply to show how the funding will be used.

"The schools know what they need best," Bachinski said.

Other prospects for funding include a public messaging campaign for everything from billboards to newspaper and radio ads based on simple messaging such as "One pill can kill," when it comes to fentanyl.

Public messaging campaigns are proven to work, Bachinski said.

The county is planning in conjunction with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, which has its own settlement funds, to create opioid kits at dropoff locations at sites in the county and reservation that would feature Naloxone, the overdose remedy, and fentanyl test strips. The "harm-reduction" kits would help make using drugs safer as people work toward recovery.

Finally, the county public health and human services department would like to create brochures for distribution at pharmacies and health care sites that would outline how to safely dispose of opioids.

"We want to do a better job of working with health care and pharmacies," Bachinski said. "Ideally, we want to develop a brochure with resources, event information and ways to safely dispose of opioids that would go with every prescription opioid given out."

Opioids that go unused and aren't disposed of properly risk being stolen and/or sold.

"That's a lot of information," an appreciative board chair Susan Zmyslonoy said following Bachinski's presentation.

Soil and water report

Cameron Gustafson, water resources technician with the Carlton Soil and Water Conservation District, met with commissioners April 2, delivering an annual report that included a major note on funding.

Comprehensive Watershed Management Planning, based in state statute, will be providing large funding pools for SWCDs and counties to use for landowner projects and staffing to get those projects planned, designed, and implemented with those landowners, according to Gustafson.

Carlton County is home to four such watersheds, including the Kettle River watershed in the southwest, Nemadji River watershed in the southeast, St. Louis River in the northeast, and Mississippi River watershed in the northwest. Those quadrants are ticketed for $706,000, $235,000, $1.1 million, and a still-to-be-determined amount, respectively.

w"Those are some really big numbers," Gustafson said. "We can utilize those funds for staffing and projects or both; that's some really good leveraging we're taking advantage of."

Last year, working with 82 new landowners on 59 new projects, with 61 existing projects being completed, the Carlton SWCD saved 270 tons of soil from erosion, or 22 dump trucks' worth.

"That's topsoil, the best growing stuff we have, and that's what our projects helped save with landowners," Gustafson said.

The SWCD prevented 153 pounds of phosphorus from reaching watersheds, where a pound of phosphorus can create 775 pounds of harmful aquatic weed growth.

"You can see the impact we're having," Gustafson said.

The Carlton SWCD worked last year on a $1.6 million budget, and the watershed funding only helps to buoy that figure going forward.

An important component of the work is outreach. Gustafson described a project with Cloquet High School last fall. He enjoyed working with ninth-grade science students as they worked to remove invasive buckthorn from the school forest.

"They're lucky enough to have a fairly large school forest on campus," Gustafson said.

Together, they identified a 1-acre chunk that was easily accessible and filled with buckthorn. Students, more than 100 of them, used removal loppers and parents dabbed stumps with herbicide to prevent regrowth. The collected brush was chopped down and burned in biochar kilns on site, Gustafson explained.

"It was a good way to engage students," he said, outlining another project in Cromwell that found 10th-graders planting and creating rain gardens around the town pavilion.

"One hundred ninth-graders and no major injuries?" one of the commissioners asked about the Cloquet project.

Gustafson and others chuckled, before adding, "We burnt some hair off an arm, putting buckthorn into the kiln."