2015 County Innovation Videos & Blogs

Located along a gritty section of Long Beach Boulevard, across the street from a 99 cent store and a used-car dealership – far away from the bright lights and glamour of Southern California – sits a non-descript two-story building. The only marking on the façade is a brightly colored mural above the entry way. Amidst a rainbow and dolphins, it reads, “Paths to Wellness and Recovery.”  This is Los Angeles County’s Long Beach Mental Health Clinic.

I enter the building and go through security under the watchful eye of the guard and a few clinic clients hanging around. I am taken upstairs to meet members of the “team.” What I find is a group of individuals utterly dedicated to improving the lives of their clients. They are the foundation of the “Care Clinic” – a fairly new, one-stop delivery system that fully integrates health care screenings, substance abuse and mental health services into a client’s treatment plan.

There’s a perception that government is inefficient, that a seemingly endless bureaucracy creates wasteful spending. Those with that opinion obviously haven’t stopped by the Ventura County Government Center, where a collaborative project among departments is resulting in more efficient and effective services for area residents at a time of increased demand.

This collaboration between the County’s Health Services Agency, General Services Agency and IT Services Department resulted in the development of a digitized mail system for mail headed to Health Services. The bottom line is quicker and more efficient services.

The old system worked, but was time-consuming and pulled staff away from their primary jobs. It often took 2-3 days from the time mail arrived at the mail center before making its way into the hands of the eligibility workers. And then the real work began. With the hard copies in hand, HSA workers would spend an estimated 16,000 hours annually scanning documents.

In Alameda County’s unincorporated neighborhoods of Cherryland and Ashland the crime and unemployment rates are higher than anywhere else in the county. Along with those alarming statistics run the side effects of poor health and various public safety concerns. So it may be surprising to some that the conversation has turned to urban farming.

Dig Deep Farms is a community-driven project and a great example of public policy in action. The collaboration between multiple county agencies and local area businesses contributed to Dig Deep Farms’ success in bettering the overall community.

“Health disparities are significant here. Rates of diabetes, childhood obesity, heart disease are well above county averages,” explained Lieutenant Marty Neideffer from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. “So it’s got all of these overlapping issues that affect public safety, public health, public education… you have to really address that overlap.”

When it comes to innovative programs, the creative wheels are definitely turning in the Sacramento County Probation Department. As part of the county’s Adult Drug Court program, clients with transportation issues can earn donated bicycles. This incentive has improved attendance while helping clients get back on their feet.

Having transportation – even of the two-wheeled variety – allows clients to regularly attend Drug Court programs and other mandatory courses, get to their jobs on time and just participate in other aspects of everyday life we often take for granted.

In 2013, Probation Department staff started looking at reasons why some clients weren’t succeeding in Drug Court. Many of the roads kept coming back to the same issue: lack of transportation. “It hits a lot of different areas – people getting to treatment, getting to education, getting to employment … so we tackled that first,” explains Carol Paris, Assistant Probation Division Chief.

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

In Stanislaus, members of the county family are following this motto through volunteer work at local elementary schools.

It’s called the Employee Mentor Program and it’s made a difference for the past 16 years.  Once a week for the entire school year, volunteers meet with the same student during the lunch hour. They serve as role models, advisers, teachers and even friends to inspire the identified at-risk students.

The Stanislaus County volunteers run the gamut, from administrative assistants to county supervisors. They work in teams of three, not only to ensure that at least one mentor meets with their selected student each week, but also to break down barriers within the county structure.

We take our roads for granted – that is, until we start hitting some teeth-rattling potholes. It’s no secret that the condition of our local streets and roads is getting increasingly dire.  In the next 10 years the local system is facing a $78.3 billion funding shortfall. And so Public Works Departments are starting to look at new, innovative approaches to road maintenance and repair.

Los Angeles County is a leader in this field. The Public Works staff has flipped the traditional strategy, now focusing first on roads that are in good shape. Focusing on good roads rather than bad ones sounds counter-intuitive. But Assistant Deputy Director Greg Kelley explains how it’s no different than getting regular dental check-ups, or changing your vehicle’s oil a consistent basis. Prevention pays off. So why not apply that philosophy to our roads? It costs less to maintain a road in good condition rather than waiting until it needs significant repair. That also frees up money that can then be invested on the county roads that need significantly more work.  Two projects alone – in Altadena and Willowbrook – saved the County more than $3 million. Kelley estimates that Los Angeles County now invests about 70 percent of its road-repair funds on maintaining good roads.

It’s only been a couple of years since airlines started offering WiFi on airplanes—but we have quickly become accustomed to having it. Think about that. You’re in an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet in the air, traveling at 600 miles an hour—and with a device that cost about as much as your plane ticket, you have the sum total of human knowledge at your fingertips. OK, most of us just watch cat videos, but if you wanted to study quantum physics, or read Plato you could do that, too!

And so in this day and age of high-speed access—from anywhere—it’s hard to imagine a school where the Principal couldn’t  email her attendance records to the district office, and worse, where the kids had to be bussed to a different school to take the state’s online standardized tests, because they didn’t have access to the internet. But that’s the situation the kids and teachers and administrators at Sheridan Elementary School in Placer County found themselves in. They had a one megabyte connection to the internet.