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I'm kind of a big dill.

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Table pickles.

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I've heard you're a pickle.

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You've got me into a few pickles every now and again.

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Welcome to County Connection, the official podcast of the Washington State Association of Counties,

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where we dive into the legislative issues shaping the future of our communities.

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From budgets to public safety, infrastructure to elections,

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we'll break down what's happening in Olympia and how it impacts counties from across the Evergreen State.

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Stay informed, stay engaged, and join us as we amplify the voice of Washington's 39 counties.

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Welcome to episode number one of the County Connection.

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I'm Paul Jewell, Government Relations Director for the Washington State Association of Counties,

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and I'm here with Janie Bodden,

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Managing Director of the Washington State Association of Local Public Health Officials,

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otherwise affectionately known as WSALFO here in Olympia.

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Today we're going to be talking about what we're going to expect during the upcoming legislative session,

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the ins and outs and what's happening around Olympia.

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Jamie, why don't you introduce yourself? Thanks for coming.

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Well, thanks Paul. It's a pleasure to be here on episode one and really excited to talk public health

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and talk county government over the next couple of weeks with legislative session.

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So WSALFO is an affiliate of WSAC.

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We serve the 35 local health jurisdictions in Washington State,

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and during session we work on all things public health, environmental public health, and health care adjacent.

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Well, who wouldn't be excited to talk about public health?

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And when I think about Olympia and all the people that are hanging out in Olympia this time of year,

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what better subject really to talk about than public health?

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Here we are on inauguration day. It's a big day here in the Capitol.

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Lots going on up at the campus. A lot of VIPs kind of showing up.

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I know you're going to be at the ball tonight. I'm going to be at the ball tonight.

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But before we get there, I thought we maybe could hit on a few things that you're expecting to see during this session.

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Not only is it inauguration day, which means we have a new governor,

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but we have a lot of other new statewide elected officials like the attorney general,

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the commissioner of public lands. There's going to be a ton of new cabinet members.

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There are a lot of new legislators.

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Heck, we have a lot of new members here at WSAC that are going to be participating in the session for the first time this year.

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Why don't you kind of give us an idea of what you're hearing?

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Yeah, with a lot of new elected officials and new legislators, I think come a lot of opportunities for education and just learning.

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There's going to be people who are learning the ropes of how to move bills, how to sponsor bills, the whole legislative process.

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And so one of the big things is going to be being that resource as lobbyists.

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Not only are we pushing legislation, but we're there to help our legislators be successful in their legislative process.

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And so with new legislators come new opportunities to build new relationships, educate on public health issues or county government issues,

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and be a resource and support for them. And that's really, really exciting.

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We get to talk about the things that we do, educate on county functions, our needs, our opportunities, our strengths, and really be that resource.

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And not only are we having a new legislature, we have a lot of new state agency heads and agency leads.

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Some of them are coming from the legislature.

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Others are tried and true state agency staff, and others are coming from outside of our state.

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So not only are we educating new legislators, we also have a lot of opportunity to kind of reset a lot of that engagement with our state partners,

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particularly over legislative session and policy issues where we get to have new conversations or maybe a slightly different conversation on some key issues

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where we might not have been as aligned or have a strong relationship with our state agencies in the past.

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So you don't have to tell any war stories here, but I'm a little curious.

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When you talk about serving as a resource and educating legislators with new legislators,

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when you go in and kind of make that introduction and you say, hey, I'm Jamie from Public Health, what sort of reaction do you get?

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Do they know a lot about public health? Do they go, huh, what's public health? I'm just a little curious.

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Yeah, we often get a reaction around one thing about public health.

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Immunizations is the big thing. COVID, the big thing that most people are familiar with.

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But public health touches so many different aspects of things. So we can talk about septics. We can talk about school health.

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We can talk about syphilis. We can talk about chronic disease prevention. We can talk about opioids.

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We can talk about a whole breadth of different things all in 15 minutes. So it can be really overwhelming.

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But usually we try to understand what are some of the interests of a new legislator.

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Maybe somebody is has young kids. So family health is really important to them.

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So we can talk about healthy living for kids, early childhood development.

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They might be big on environmental health. And so we can talk about septics and clean drinking water and clean air.

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So it's an opportunity to find a lot of different common ground with a lot of different legislators and make it interesting to them.

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Do you find a lot of takers on that big septic topic there?

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You know, surprisingly, it is one where people don't seem to find a lot of excitement around, but they sure do care about it when things hit the fan.

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Things hit the fan. I like that. Well, I could, you know, our audience here, of course, are county commissioners.

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They certainly have their own level of experience talking about septic on a pretty regular basis. So at least they can relate.

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Let's move on. You know, there's obviously the challenges of new members all the way around, both in the legislature and in the agencies and in leadership.

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But the legislature marches on, right, regardless of changes in leadership, regardless of all the new members.

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There are things that have been worked on for years that are progressing. There can be new things that come up.

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What are you expecting to be kind of the hot topics this year?

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A number of things and some perennial topics that seem to just always require refinement.

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Housing already a big issue this year. Monday had a pretty big housing bill heard in committee around rent control.

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Housing is going to be an ongoing issue touching many different committees and all kind of facets around housing, whether it's affordability or access or just stock for housing.

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So that's a big issue. The governor elect Ferguson, soon to be Governor Ferguson, has made it very clear public safety is also a big issue for him.

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So we can expect probably some bills and proposals around public safety.

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So why are public safety and housing public health issues? That doesn't sound like that's really within your wheelhouse.

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You know, a lot of the other things you talked about septic, right, STIs, pandemic, right, the coronavirus, immunizations, et cetera.

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What do you think most people think of with public health? Why are housing and public safety kind of in that realm of discussion?

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Yeah, they're not necessarily the most obvious in our wheelhouse.

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And we certainly have other WSAC policy staff who those are their primus primary portfolios.

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But we care about housing because we know when people are housing secure, they tend to be economically secure.

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And being economically secure is a huge indicator and a huge impact to one's health.

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You're able to, you know, buy food on a regular basis. You're able to do what you need to do to take care of yourself.

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Those have huge outcomes to somebody's health. So we care about housing because we know that it's a very big upstream indicator of what a healthy community needs.

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We also touch a lot of the homelessness, unhoused work in terms of encampments and things adjacent to that, too.

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So the complexity of housing, we have little feelers or little parts here and there that we that we are particularly involved in or just very interested in because we know it has an upstream impacts to public health.

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Similarly to public safety, we know safe communities mean that people are going to be spending more time outside when people spend more time outside. They tend to be more recreationally active, healthy living, vibrant communities, all good things, all good things.

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And all and all mean thriving communities. And that really gets to the crux of what public health is about.

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So we've heard, you know, about some of the things that you expect to come up. But you also must have a few things that you want to work on.

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Right. You represent Wasolfo, which we already mentioned was a Washington State Association of Local Public Health Officials. It's a mouthful for sure.

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But affectionately referred to as Wasolfo. Wasolfo always comes into the legislative session with a few priorities. What are yours this year?

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Yeah, we have two kind of policy priority areas and then two big budget areas, knowing that it's going to be a tough budget year.

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But wanting to continue some of the conversation that we've had on some big budget asks that we've had over several years and will continue to have.

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So policy wise, we are moving forward a policy bill that didn't quite make the finish line last year in terms of getting passed.

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So we're bringing it back again this year. And that is our child fatality modernization bill.

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That bill through foundational public health services, we've been able to establish and get more local teams set up with these fatality reviews.

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Reviews help inform localized strategies to prevent childhood injury and death. It's a really very powerful tool.

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Can be very emotional, can be very heavy, but ultimately is a really good strategy to reduce injury and death for our young folk.

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Tough issue. Tough issue. Through FPHS, Foundational Public Health Services, we have identified some opportunities to update current statute.

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It's a little bit outdated in terms of language. There's some murkiness around accessing records, around age.

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We really want to emphasize the prevention aspect of these review teams. So we're pursuing an essentially an update and modernization of the current statute.

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It also aligns with other review teams, our overdose and suicide fatality review team.

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So getting that language consistent is really helpful too.

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One thing that I just want to touch on a little bit. You've mentioned FPHS or Foundational Public Health Services a couple of times.

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If people are just joining county government, haven't been following public health, they may not know what that is.

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Unfortunately, there's not previous podcasts for them to go back and look at or listen to because this is the first one.

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But FPHS or Foundational Public Health was a major, major effort by public health coming out of the last really great recession, right?

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When a lot of funding was cut for public health, you guys kind of formed this system of these are the things that we really need in our communities in order to be successful.

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And you've been working on funding that, right? And funding that system. You've been really successful the last few years.

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But here we are now. We've recovered through the pandemic and we've got great funding for public health in place.

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But we're facing a 10 to 12 billion dollar budget deficit in Washington state. Are you worried about that?

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How is that going to affect the trajectory for FPHS and that funding stream that you've been able to secure?

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That's a really great question. And the answer, of course, is complicated.

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I think, you know, given budget landscape and budget projections, we really have to be good communicators in the work that we're doing around FPHS.

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At its at its kind of essence, Foundational Public Health Services is a set of government services that the public should and could expect to be everywhere, present everywhere.

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And implemented by either local health jurisdictions or state partners, but that there's a base level of services and those base level of services are kind of the core of what other public health services might latch on to.

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So that funding has been incredibly instrumental in building back some lost capacity that we that was removed during the recession, whether that was our ability to respond to disease outbreaks or emerging issues.

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You know, COVID is a good example of that. But more recently outbreaks in Pertussis or the avian influenza outbreak that's been happening across the country.

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Most, I think, prominently in the Tri-Cities area about a couple months ago, FPHS has built back that capacity to be able to respond quickly, adapt and, you know, pivot staff to those outbreaks.

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It's also built back capacity around a lot of environmental health issues. So we're able to work with restaurants more personally in terms of inspections and making sure that they're providing safe.

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I think we all like that. You know, who doesn't love a nice safe restaurant to patron? And we know that, you know, a restaurant that has safe practices is going to stay in business longer.

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And we like, you know, economically viable, you know, opportunities for our businesses to thrive.

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We're able to do better communication around different public health issues, whether that is just promotional messages on healthy living or risk communications on adverse weather events like extreme cold or poor air quality because of wildfires.

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All of those are FPHS services that are very community focused. So it's really critical that we are able to preserve and maintain those through the funding that we're receiving.

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We are, you know, concerned as a lot of different entities are around budget and what that might mean for cuts and reductions.

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But it's our job to really promote and talk and describe the work that we're already doing with FPHS, the good work that we're doing to help our communities be wonderful places to live.

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Yeah. In the past, public health has always been a target with budget cuts.

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You think that your efforts around FPHS and maybe even the recent pandemic kind of changed that narrative a little bit?

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I think in some aspects, it's really hard for public health because if we do our job, a lot of things don't happen.

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And how do you describe something that didn't happen in a way that is an attractive investment?

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It's a story with counties, right? Law enforcement, solid waste, right? Water, public health, roads, streets. Oh, the bridge didn't collapse. Certainly you don't need money for it, right?

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So these positive outcomes that you're talking about, it's hard to say. It's hard for people to visualize what could happen in absence of that funding source, right?

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Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So then when something bad does happen, it's great to be able to see like, see, this is why we're needed.

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But yet something bad happens. And that is not our goal is to not let the bad things happen.

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And so it is always this challenge of how do you articulate prevention and the work that we do while also highlighting some of the emerging things that showcase our importance.

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It's definitely a balance of that. Yeah, it's a weird place to be, right?

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And you're a really good example of that. Your job is prevention. And when you're successful, nothing happens and people aren't aware. Such an interesting part of the conversation.

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Well, thanks, Jamie, for coming. Appreciate it. We're going to be doing this every couple of weeks. So you'll come back and talk to us, right?

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Always.

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All right. Great. Thanks, Jamie. Take care.

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You too.

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Thanks for tuning in to County Connection. Stay in the loop by subscribing to us through your preferred podcasting app and following us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

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And don't forget to join the hub, your go to source for the latest news and updates from the Washington State Association of Counties.

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Until next time, stay connected and stay informed.