Justice Management Institute outlines multi-year CJC strategy; recommends bylaws, steering committee and expanded membership

Tom Eberly and Amy Wichman of the Justice Management Institute presented a status update on the Community Justice Council’s strategic-plan development and solicited council feedback on priorities and organizational recommendations.

The nut graf: JMI advised the council to focus near-term strategy on four priorities — behavioral health and substance-use response, pre-arrest diversion and pretrial alternatives, reentry and reintegration, and crime/violence prevention as a cross-cutting concern — while adopting governance updates (bylaws, a steering committee, membership expansion and performance metrics) to improve execution and coordination.

Eberly said JMI’s work follows stakeholder interviews and planning-team workshops and that the next steps include deeper work sessions in August and a September return with more concrete timelines and resource estimates. “We were brought in by the CJC to help develop a strategic plan for the next 1, 2, and 3 years,” Eberly said.

JMI summarized proposed priority areas and candidate tactics identified by planning teams: creating or sustaining a behavioral-health crisis triage or stabilization center; expanding peer-support roles; improving medication continuity at release; strengthening warm-hand‑off and cross‑system navigation; initiating a jail intake reentry engagement process and a jail release portal with warm handoffs; piloting short‑term emergency sheltering to support reentry; optimizing community restorative court and deferred-prosecution programs; quantifying and addressing reasons for court nonappearance; and studying alternative responses for low‑level charges such as disorderly conduct.

On organizational structure, JMI recommended that the CJC adopt national Criminal Justice Coordinating Council standards and expand core membership to include municipal judges, police chiefs, the jail administrator, the public defender, probation leadership, the pretrial services director, the mayor or deputy mayor and the Department of Human Services director. Consultants also advised forming a smaller steering committee of officers and key gatekeepers to meet between full-CJC meetings, to prioritize initiatives, advise staff and ensure bylaw compliance.

Eberly and Wichman proposed concrete governance tools: formal written bylaws (vision/mission, member roles, officer duties and delegates), a limited set of 15–20 key performance indicators to act as a dashboard for system trends, and a communications plan for coordinated public messaging during emergent events. The consultants said the CJC already performs many functions of a high-performing coordinating council and rated it favorably in a national comparison, but they said these additional governance elements would reduce confusion about voting membership, improve continuity and make follow-up work more consistent.

Council members generally supported the priorities and governance suggestions while urging realism about resource constraints. Several members said some items (a triage center, community justice center or new reentry housing) would be multi-year, potentially decade-scale efforts that require external funding. Supervisor Wade Leitner and others argued that shifting responses upstream may reduce emergency costs in policing and jails. Colleen from the county executive’s office reiterated the county executive’s interest in using the CJC’s work to inform budgeting and cross‑agency decisions.

Members asked that JMI continue to emphasize actionable, near-term items the council can achieve within a three-year window (for example, research tasks, pilot programs and bylaw adoption), while keeping larger vision items on a longer-term list for sustained advocacy. The consultants agreed and said August work sessions would further define timelines, difficulty and resourcing for each tactic.

No formal policy was adopted at the meeting. The council approved the minutes from the May 29 meeting at the start of the session and later adjourned without opposition; consultants will deliver a full written report and return with more specific recommendations in September.