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Whatcom County data work group urges staffing, dashboard work amid budget constraints
Summary
The data work group told the joint committee it had recommended hiring a dedicated staffer and building a dashboard to stitch local court, health and justice data together, but said the county has not committed funding and the work faces resistance during a tight budget year.
Cedric Johnson, leading the IPRTF data work group, told the committee on Dec. 16 that members had recommended hiring a staff position to coordinate data and reporting for justice and behavioral‑health programs and that recommendation was forwarded to the county council in October. "We plan to continue trying to work these recommendations through the county," he said, but added there has been "a little bit of resistance" because the county faces a difficult budget year.
Committee members discussed existing tools and the potential to leverage Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) resources to display caseload and disparity information. AOC materials were identified as an immediate, lower‑cost option that staff said they would share with the committees for review.
Dean White and others reported early work on a preliminary dashboard by county staff and consultants (named in the meeting as Marty Solomon and Holly); members asked for contact information for the AOC presentation team so they could evaluate existing options and avoid unnecessary expense.
Speakers stressed data quality constraints. Court and corrections staff described common problems that complicate linking records across systems—duplicate identifiers, inconsistent race/ethnicity fields and variation between booking and court charging documents—that must be resolved or documented before dashboards are used to make policy decisions.
The response systems division said it will issue a solicitation in January for a multi‑year evaluation of several response systems programs; committee leaders framed that evaluation as an opportunity to align metrics across committees and prioritize interoperable data collection.
Cedric asked committee chairs to consider inviting newly elected county officials with mental‑health backgrounds to brief the group and help advance the staffing recommendation to the council. No county funding commitment was recorded in the meeting minutes.
