Board gets first look at female jail program

When the state afforded an additional $10 million to Carlton County in 2023 to help fund the new $75 million Justice Center, the money came with a stipulation. The project would include a justice-involved female program to serve as a demonstration project that might one day be replicated in other parts of the state.

More women were being jailed and incarcerated, and lawmakers were sold on the idea of a creative solution to the problem.

The 16-bed justice-involved female portion of the jail - its walls color-coded in purple - is a separate part of the 80-bed facility.

At its committee of the whole meeting Tuesday in Carlton, the county board heard about the steps being taken to build the justice-involved female program from scratch.

"Having the program developed and explained is one of the things that we're required to do," jail administrator Paul Coughlin said, in order to receive the $10 million payment.

Coughlin outlined several first-time details about the program, which will be used to house women who have been sentenced for mostly misdemeanor crimes. The goal will be to help women turn their lives around using a local sentencing backed with intensive

programming.

"What this is doing is trying to return all of that activity [related to incarceration] to the local community to stop people from becoming a felon," Coughlin said. "Plus, by keeping in the community and staying closer to the community, it helps them in their return."

For starters, the program will be 12 weeks with eight-hour days programmed Mondays through Fridays. Coughlin showcased a cognitive skills program by a California-based company, BrainHQ, that would offer computer-based learning for 90 minutes a day. The remaining 6.5 hours of programming remains in development, and Coughlin said he wants a jail director to be on board prior to further buildout of the justice-involved female program.

"This is a very unique opportunity and I bear the weight of understanding that and trying to get it right," said Coughlin, who previously oversaw construction of the $75 million project. "The first iteration maybe doesn't look the same as the third, which is typical when you're building a brand-new program like this, but the one thing we want to make sure is that we start down a path that makes sense, and that five years from now we're not asking, 'Why did we start this?' or 'How do we turn this around?'"

The computer-based cognitive learning would be put to use in an American jail for the first time, Coughlin said. That's mainly because jail terms are shorter and don't include intensive efforts at rehabilitation.

The cognitive skills program has been studied and found effective in prison settings and for juveniles who are displaying destructive behaviors.

"One of the most proven statistical improvements of people's outcomes is working with their cognitive abilities," Coughlin said.

Many female jail inhabitants come from having "adverse childhood experiences," Coughlin told the board, and the BrainHQ programming helps rewire thought processes through repetitive challenges. The goal is to help people develop more positive attitudes and better critical thinking. The program has proven effective in other settings, Coughlin said, leading to success rates of 60 percent or more across important categories such as finding lasting employment upon completion of the program.

Coughlin speculated that the county's existing restorative justice program would be considered to help fulfill additional programming hours, but he said the highly used restorative justice office didn't have capacity to add to its workloads.

Commissioners seemed to like the idea of using restorative justice to augment the jail program.

"If we need to add capacity, we add capacity," commissioner Tom Proulx said. "That's what we need to do."

The justice-involved female program is expected to start sometime in 2025. The county is in the process of developing a job description for a jail director to oversee things such as day-to-day programming.

"I think we're on the right track," board chair Susan Zmyslony said, adding it was important to hire a director to "help walk that path with us."

Board formalizing tribal negotiations team

The county board unanimously voted to advance a proposal that would create a formal Tribal-County Dialogue Team. The county and Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have been meeting quarterly in recent years at alternating sites. The meetings include lunch and generally last an hour, with officials and department heads from both sides attending.

County coordinator Dennis Genereau argued that, while informational, the talks don't drill down as far as the county would like.

"I just feel the county and tribe would benefit if we were a little bit more strategic in our approach," Genereau said.

He proposed a group made up of himself, two commissioners, the county attorney, sheriff, director of public health and human services, county engineer, and additional department heads as needed depending on the topics at hand. The group would meet to develop priorities in advance of the quarterly meetings and afterward to debrief.

The county has multiple issues it would like to see progress on, related to shared interests with the tribe, including economic development, road and bridge projects, courts and probation. But Genereau cited two specific areas the county would like to advance its objectives:

• Collection on the reservation of the two half-cent local option sales taxes in place in the county - one for transportation projects and one to collect $60 million to pay for the new Justice Center. The Band currently does not collect the taxes. "We haven't been able to move the band in the direction of actually collecting that on the reservation," Genereau said.

• The movement of fee land into trust land. The county is notified by the federal government when the tribe moves fee land into nontaxed trusts.

"That does have an impact on our overall levy tax base," Genereau said, arguing that active dialogue would benefit the county more than writing response letters. The board will vote on the proposal to create the dialogue team at its 4 p.m. Dec. 11 meeting, which is followed by the annual Truth-in-Taxation meeting at 6 p.m. at the Transportation Building in Carlton.

Board rejects notion of county marijuana

The Carlton County board rejected Tuesday, without a vote, the idea of opening a county-owned and -operated cannabis retail business. Commissioner Marv Bodie, vice chair, said the county might have considered such an endeavor if it would have been able to corner the market. But since the Fond du Lac Band has expressed its plans to open an operation, and commercial operators are expected to be up and running sometime in 2025, commissioners ruled out an urge to compete in the market.

"I see heads shaking like, 'No, we're not interested,'" Bodie said. "When this first came up it was discussed that if we could limit it, corner the market and make the profits, we'd think about it."

That's not the case. Instead, the state is getting ready to issue its long-awaited series of grow and retail licenses. There is a finite number of licenses being issued by the state via a lottery process that has been delayed in the courts, explained Kevin DeVriendt, county auditor and treasurer.

"Our role in it is registration of it," he said.

The board conducted a public hearing Nov. 25 to introduce its proposed cannabis ordinance. The ordinance is mostly boilerplate taken from the Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management. The public hearing was sparsely attended, and DeVriendt explained the county will serve a limited role in the cannabis industry.

Unlike tobacco and liquor sales, which are licensed by the county, the county will hold no such oversight or control over the state-issued cannabis licenses. Instead, the county will keep a registry of businesses, and be responsible for enforcement of things such as compliance checks, to ensure age requirements are being verified.

An initial registration fee will not exceed $500 and would require annual renewal. County attorney Lauri Ketola has reviewed the proposed ordinance, and there were no public objections to the ordinance. The board will vote on the proposed ordinance at its Dec. 11 meeting.

Despite the county's non-involvement in licensing, DeVrient compared the new cannabis retail and grow operations to the tobacco and liquor industries in terms of what folks can expect.

"I don't know how many grow operations will be in the county," he said on Nov. 25.

It's also still unclear how many retail outlets there will be when legal cannabis rolls out in 2025.

One retailer, Nick Montanari of Salute Dispensary in Cloquet, called in to the hearing to say the industry is eager to bring in legalized cannabis. The low-dose hemp products that are currently legal and available are not the cash cow many outsiders seem to think, Montanari said.

"Retail life is a little difficult right now, so I'm hoping that the fees won't exceed anyone's budget," he said. "I feel like there might be a feeling that everyone is making money in this industry right now, but actually times are along the lines of tough."

Cloquet and Moose Lake are in the process of adopting their own cannabis ordinances. And the county has also amended its public smoking ordinance to include restrictions for cannabis use - including edibles - and vaping.