Yesterday, the Thurston County Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) met to discuss the commissioner’s items in the Justice Counts and Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations initiatives.
Thurston County will be joining the Justice Counts initiative, made possible by 22 criminal justice organizations in partnership with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, led by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center.
According to its site, Justice Counts is a national “consensus-building initiative” designed to help policymakers make better decisions with timely, relevant, and useful criminal justice data.
Criminal Justice Regional Program Manager Leah Landon explained the benefits of joining the initiative as a founding member.
“As one of the first members of the initiative, we would get access to free technical assistance through the initiative to help grow our data practices here in Thurston County,” said Landon. “One of our goals is to create a data warehouse here in Thurston County, and this is the first step towards taking that – so this would be, again, free technical assistance.”
The bureau’s technical assistance team is expected to help the county develop a data governance plan and structure with law-related stakeholders, which the county will then use to create a data warehouse for data analysis purposes.
Landon explained that the initiative creates an opportunity to start consolidating the county’s work in strategic planning.
“Thurston County’s law and justice data is quite siloed, but all of our law and justice stakeholders are in agreement that we want to get out of that. We want to move forward with a better data system, where we can use our data to more efficiently and effectively understand our programs in the work that we’re doing,” said Landon.
Thurston County is also moving forward in making electric vehicle charging stations available and accessible to residents.
“This is an enabling policy that authorizes the county to provide electric vehicle charging to the public on county property. It states the intention that level 2 charging will be provided at no cost and DC fast charging will be, if the county decides to move forward with providing, it would be for a fee,” Climate Mitigation Senior Program Manager Rebecca Harvey said.
The policy provides guidance on ownership, funding, site identification, planning, and the use of EV charging stations.
“It comes to the fact that the county does not currently have a policy in place to enable public-facing charging, and we need to have such a policy in place to be able to move forward and apply for the infrastructure grants that are available to us,” Harvey added.
The board unanimously passed both resolutions for the Justice Counts partnership and EV charging stations.
3 comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here
Honestyandrealityguy
Such a joke. Limited mileage. Fire risk and more. When we get an old President, this will be corrected.
Thursday, November 9, 2023 Report this
Madeline_Bishop
Thurston County is moving away from supporting fossil fuels that are destroying our climate. I applaud your efforts!.
Thursday, November 9, 2023 Report this
DesertMedic
How many residents drive these things? It is another case of us pandering to the small loud libs. For people to think that climate change never happened before having never seen or heard of dinosaurs, as well as thinking how the batteries are built is done in a human climate friendly way. When we are able to get a real president, we can fix some of this. WA will never have a real Gov. as we are too blue to think for ourselves.
Thursday, November 9, 2023 Report this