I always try and go with something premeditated.
Oh, premeditated.
I've heard that about you.
I wanted to see the Constitution
and I actually leaned on the glass and got reprimanded.
Oh, I'll bet you did.
It was hard to read without getting close.
What did they tell you?
Did they say, hey, lady, back off.
Ma'am, ma'am, don't touch the glass.
I was like, okay.
Welcome to County Connection,
the official podcast of the Washington State Association
of Counties, where we dive into the legislative issues
shaping the future of our communities.
From budgets to public safety, infrastructure to elections,
we'll break down what's happening in Olympia
and how it impacts counties from across the Evergreen State.
Stay informed, stay engaged, and join us
as we amplify the voice of Washington's 39 counties.
All right, welcome everybody
to the County Connection podcast.
I'm Paul Jewell, the government relations director
for the Washington State Association of Counties
and your host on the County Connection here today
and every day.
It's a gorgeous day in Olympia.
It is Thursday.
I think it is March 6th, if I'm not mistaken.
And I am honored to be joined today
by not one, but two local heroes.
That's my pet name for county commissioners
because you guys are local heroes.
You know I have the greatest respect
for the work that you do.
You're some of the most dedicated public servants out there
and probably in my opinion the most important
on a government level.
I have Jefferson County Commissioner, Heidi Eisenhower.
Almost butchered your name there, sorry Commissioner.
It's okay, Paul. Heidi Eisenhower
and Clallam County Commissioner, Mark Ozais.
What's nice about you guys is you are not seat mates,
but you are colleagues from bordering counties
out on the peninsula.
How are you guys doing?
Commissioner Eisenhower, how are you?
What brings you to Olympia today?
Well, the legislative steering committee, Paul.
Oh, of course, I've heard of that.
And it's my first year being
on the legislative steering committee.
So feel like we're still drinking from the fire hose.
I appreciate it every week that our report
on the number of bills we're gonna talk about gets shorter.
Yeah, we appreciate that too.
Doesn't weigh two pounds anymore.
Are we halfway through the session now?
Almost, almost. Not halftime yet.
Next Wednesday is process-wise halfway through.
I haven't counted the days lately, but we're getting close.
So, you know, we've been down here talking
about issues that matter to our communities
and then also shared issues
that the county's family are working on.
Well, I'm glad that you're here
and thanks for joining us today on the podcast.
Is this your first podcast ever?
You're kind of on the radio at home
from time to time, aren't you?
We have a weekly, the county commissioners
in Jefferson County have a regular weekly radio show
every Friday from noon 1230 to 1255.
And it's called County Connections.
Oh, really? Yeah.
That's hilarious. Yeah.
So you're probably better at my job than I am at my job
on this podcast.
Now I feel a little nervous being in your presence.
I, in your presence, I didn't know that you were
on the radio that much.
Well, you were a county commissioner once too, Paul,
and you have more experience at that than me.
So back at you.
Well, no one would know that this is your first year
on LSC because you're doing a great job.
Thanks.
Commissioner Ozaias, what brings you to Olympia today?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's also LSC.
It is also LSC.
And what I would say about LSC is obviously
that's a very legislative policy focused group,
but it is also a rare opportunity to get together
with colleagues.
For many of us, this can be a pretty isolating job,
particularly for a member of a three, a three person board.
And so the opportunity to get down here
on a semi-regular basis and have conversations,
learn from each other is to me equally as helpful
as all of the focus on the legislative work that we do.
Yeah.
That old saying leadership is lonely is really true.
And you find that out as a county commissioner.
Real good leadership is even lonelier, that's for sure.
So having the opportunity to engage with your colleagues,
maybe even just commiserate every now and again
can be very, very rejuvenating.
Well, it's half commiseration and half learning, I think,
and a little bit of humor mixed in every once in a while
as well.
But I find almost all county commissioners
to be community minded, problem solving, practical people who
want to figure out how to make things work better.
And to me, that makes for a great group of people.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, I really mean it when I say you guys are local heroes.
I don't think most people really understand
what it takes to be a county commissioner.
A lot of people don't even understand
what it takes to run a county.
I gave a presentation, just a little story,
a little while ago in front of a group
where I asked who in the crowd could name the eight things
that the county did for you.
Oh, you guys were there, weren't you?
I think we were both there, Paul.
Oh, jeez, I don't even need to tell you the story.
But of course, it was a trick question
because there's like 85 things your county does for you.
Don't worry, you were great.
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate it.
It's just an example of how little people really
know and understand about county government
and what counties do.
On that note, I just would say I studied politics and government
starting in seventh grade.
I think was the first class that I took all the way
through college, had a degree in politics and government.
And I don't recall county government being mentioned
once.
Yeah, isn't that amazing?
In all of those years, and considering
that county governments are really
the primary implementers of state and often
federal legislation, it's just remarkable to me
what an oversight that is.
Well, yeah, there's such big regional governments too.
All the services they provide to both residents
in incorporated areas, so in cities
and outside of those areas.
It's kind of amazing that they don't get the airplay, I guess,
or maybe the pages in the civics textbooks.
But I think some of it's because they're
very different from one side of the country to the other.
And we're about to talk about that a little bit.
But also, county governments are just unique.
They don't have that same exact formula
of legislative, executive, and judicial branch
that you see at the federal and the state level.
And really, almost at the city level more so.
Counties are kind of an amalgamation
of those different separations of powers
embedded in different offices.
But this is not a county government 101 show.
As you know, we focus a lot on what's
going on legislatively here at the County Connection
podcast, especially this time of year.
And mostly, we're talking about state legislation.
But you guys are here to talk about something
a little different.
You all just got back from Washington, DC, right?
We did.
We just got back from the NACO Legislative Conference.
NACO is the National Association of Counties.
I was just going to tell you to tell people what that is.
Anytime you use an analogy of this show,
you've got to explain what it is.
Legislative Conference.
And I went back concerned about secure rural schools
and payment in lieu of taxes, which
are funding programs that deliver money to the counties.
Let's quickly tell people what payment in lieu of taxes
is on a federal level.
So payment of lieu in taxes goes to counties
that had a reduction in revenue based
on the loss of timber revenue due to the Spotted Owl
decision.
Well, actually, so that was more SRS.
So that's the Secure Rural Schools funding.
That money can be used for schools
and for transportation projects primarily.
But it was nice to have Paul Jewell in your pocket.
Well, I'm here to help, Commissioner.
But that's the money.
And it's really easy to confuse PILT and SRS,
because they're really two programs that
are joined at the hip.
And they're intended.
So SRS is really for US Forest Service lands,
for counties with US Forest Service lands,
because it's supposed to help replace revenue that
was lost due to less timber harvest because of things
like the Spotted Owl.
Right, versus PILT, which is payment in lieu of taxes
to make up for non-taxable federal lands
within your jurisdiction.
But they're very, like I said, they're super close related.
And they have not reauthorized PILT, or I'm sorry,
SRS this year.
So you were back there chatting about that,
or that was something you were really interested in.
Yeah, I mean, it's good to have examples in your pocket.
And I said, well, in our county, we
use Secure Rural Schools fund to chip seal our roads.
So there's a rivalry between ourselves and our one town
in our county.
We are a small county.
We have Port Townsend.
And people say, well, the county roads are in OK shape.
What's wrong with the city roads?
And I say, about Secure Rural Schools,
we need to keep that funding coming,
because otherwise our county roads are
going to look not so great.
Right, that's why they're in good shape,
is because you get that extra funding.
When I was back at NACO for PILT,
we mentioned its payment in lieu of taxes.
One of the NACO legislative folks
called it pennies in lieu of trillions.
Did you hear that?
No.
Which I thought is a really good description.
Because really, because of those federal lands
and the large amounts of them in many of our counties
in Washington state, that's all non-taxable.
And in the county where it's more extreme,
like in, say, Schamania County, it's
like 90% to 95% of their land use.
97%, I heard.
That's amazing.
And in both Clallam and Jefferson Counties,
Olympic National Park would be the most significant chunk
of federal land and certainly very impactful.
And to speak to the importance of SRS being reauthorized
and refunded, in addition to being
able to support roads and other things,
it's often local jurisdictions that aren't only building roads
but maybe providing fire service or rescue service
or other things to those federal lands.
And so having some revenue source
that would allow us to support the service
provision that's required for those federal lands
is pretty important.
Yeah.
So PILT and SRS funding and reauthorization
were part of the legislative platform
for the National Association of Counties, which
is great for us here in Washington state
and most Western states, because that's
a big issue for us locally.
What were some of the other issues
that you guys thought had particular pertinence
to Washington state and some of the work
that we're doing as counties?
It's a little hard to answer that, really,
because things are not normal in Washington DC right now.
And so we certainly were there talking
about legislative priorities and other broad legislative
priorities for the National Association of Counties.
And for us, include investments in emergency management
and concern about the farm bill and what kind of programs
are there.
For example, how well will SNAP benefits
be supported in the farm bill?
So there's a lot of-
OK, though, Commissioner, you said SNAP benefits.
And that doesn't mean just regular, when we say SNAP,
we're not just going, yeah, we're not talking about that.
So what does SNAP mean?
That stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
OK, so we're talking like food benefits for DD families.
Right, exactly.
And which is often an integral part of the farm bill,
I assume, because of the connection
to agricultural products that create the food that
produce that assistance.
So is there a question as to whether or not
that's going to be continued as part of the farm bill,
or if they're going to continue those benefits
or reduce those benefits?
Or if you've been watching the news lately a couple of weeks
ago when the big shakeup happened
and there was that freeze on all future,
or temporary freeze on all government funding
from the federal level, one of the things that came out
was these SNAP benefits.
And some families at least made claims.
I never had a chance to verify them or not.
And I don't know why we would not believe them.
But they had claimed that their SNAP benefits weren't
being paid for, that they weren't receiving those.
Is that happening?
Is that a concern moving forward?
Are they planning to reduce the program, increase the program?
And what's the issue with that?
Well, I think the concern right now
is that there's not enough consistency in communication
and telegraphing potential strategy that anyone knows.
And so the sense that I got from the congressional meetings
that we had is there's just an extreme lack of communication
and information between the new administration
and legislators.
So they're working very hard to try and figure out
what the priorities are and what the pathway might be
so that they understand how to react,
whether that's to be supportive or to push back
against an important local benefit that
might be on the chopping block.
I was just going to throw in the word chaos.
We were hearing the word chaos a lot.
Feels chaotic here.
We're in a state of chaos.
The quick actions by the administration
have really created a sense of not knowing what's next.
And in all of our meetings, I think
we did all of our meetings together.
We heard that across the board.
Our first two meetings were talking
about some roads on the west end of our peninsula
and with staff of Senators Murray and Cantwell.
And those staff were talking about the chaos.
And then we actually met with Congressman Randall.
Again, chaos, a lack of knowing what's coming next.
And that felt very tenuous.
Yeah, talking about the meetings,
I think hearing your impressions from those meetings
just in general and then specifically
from some of these issues is something
that I want to get into.
But when you talk about the chaos and the uncertainty that
seems to be pervasive right now in the other Washington,
because let's just make it clear,
we're talking about the other Washington, not this one today.
But we heard a lot of that from the legislative folks
at NACO too.
And we're paying attention to how frequently they
were updating their legislative agenda.
Well, I think it was daily, actually.
It was moment to moment in some cases.
And we had brought our own legislative agenda
and our own legislative priorities
and ended up pitching those into the trash
before these meetings because we didn't have the ability
to update as frequently because we were working remotely,
didn't have the tools that we would normally
have back in the office.
I was in many of those meetings and I heard it
from both sides of the aisle too.
Is that consistent with what you heard as well
from both Republicans and Democrats?
Well, I didn't meet with any Republican legislators.
So I was actually interested to hear more about that.
And I hope that when we have a little bit more
thorough of a debrief on these visits
that we'll learn a little bit more about that.
It was a challenge trying to talk about what would normally
be sort of a standard set of priorities
with the context of all of that uncertainty.
There were other, there were some discrete projects
that we were there to talk about and that was fine.
Well, yeah, how do you know what to ask for
if there's no predictable environment moving forward?
That makes it pretty tough.
Right, how important is this local access road
with everything else that's going on?
Right, right.
I don't know, it felt like we were a lot in a lot of cases
responding to what we were hearing.
And what we're hearing in the news,
what we're hearing, Medicaid,
a lot of concern about Medicaid.
Yeah.
I mean, from all of our counties.
Let's dive into that.
So what's the main, cause that was a central theme.
Medicaid was a pretty big issue and it is something
that is being targeted for cuts
by the current administration, right?
They have said that they want to cut,
what is it, four or five trillion dollars out of the budget.
And it's pretty tough to do that
without looking at entitlements.
And Medicaid is one of the biggest ones, right?
But Medicaid is pretty important
from a county perspective as well
from a variety of different considerations.
So what is kind of going on with Medicaid?
What were we advocating for and what did you hear back?
Well, we were advocating for retaining funding,
robust funding for Medicaid.
Because especially in rural counties like ours,
it really affects the citizens who need support the most
for healthcare.
And I think that Apple Health in Washington State
gets a lot of support through Medicaid.
Yeah, they do.
So it is Medicaid.
So we're talking about, I don't know how many millions
of people in Washington State.
I think I saw some number of 53 million nationally
that would be impacted by a reduction in Medicaid
because we pay for basic healthcare.
And any reduction to Medicaid would be concerning
for a number of reasons.
Certainly in a lot of rural areas,
hospitals have a significant portion of their constituency
that are on Medicaid.
And so that makes up a big portion of the revenue
as it were for that supports local hospitals
and puts rural hospitals at risk.
But the other thing that I imagine being potentially
low-hanging fruit on the chopping block
would be Medicaid to support programs
like we've been working so hard to advocate for
to allow Medicaid to be billed
for certain healthcare services
when someone becomes incarcerated in a county jail,
for example.
And when anyone gets booked into a county jail,
the burden of their healthcare costs
is borne by local taxpayers.
It would be great for a lot of reasons
to be able to bill Medicaid
if they're already Medicaid eligible for those services.
And we've been working across the state
to implement some changes like that.
A number of counties, including Clallam,
are leading the way to figure out how to make that work.
Just for this year,
we've got about a million dollars worth of revenue
built into our budget
with the expectation that that program is gonna continue.
So if that's the type of cut that's made,
it's gonna have significant impacts,
not only to the individuals who are on Medicaid,
but to local government funding as well.
So this is a really interesting topic,
and I think it threads into a lot of different things.
When you talk about the chaos
that's happening in the other Washington right now,
and then you're having these meetings with legislators,
and you wanna do things like advocate for pre-adjudicated
or pre-sentencing at least, right?
That was the proposal that we wanted to say is,
look, when people come into our jail,
yes, they've been arrested, they've been detained,
but they're not sentenced yet.
So they're innocent until proven guilty.
Why are they losing their benefits,
and why are we having to cover those, right?
And so we wanna advocate for that,
but if what's on the table for chopping is basic benefits,
how do you advocate for something extra
when you should be probably putting your efforts
into saving what you have, right?
And when you talk about how critical that is
for some of the rural hospitals,
and many of those are considered critical access hospitals,
which I know is a designation
based on the services they provide
and the distance between medical care facilities, right?
Their charity care line is already pretty significant,
and it affects the rates that they charge to private pay
and other people who have insurance.
You add a bunch of people now
who have lost their Medicaid coverage,
and those hospitals could go under,
which would severely hurt communities.
Did you guys talk about that with the representatives
or the senators, and what did they say?
Yeah, we did.
I think that the legislators that Heidi and I met
would specifically have a pretty good understanding of that,
so we didn't have to work too hard to reinforce that point,
but at a minimum, we wanted to keep that
on their radar screens and make sure
that they're thinking about what the specific impacts
to individuals and systems in our county
and our region would be.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you hear the same thing, Commissioner?
Yeah, because I was in all the same meetings with Mark.
But I wanted to shine a little bit of a light on-
That makes it easy.
On the farm bill issue, right?
Before I went to D.C., I was hearing about this idea
of potential tariffs and the impact to potash
coming from Canada to our farmers in the U.S.
I don't think the scale of farmers that operate
on the Olympic Peninsula are really concerned about potash,
but-
Okay, before you go any further,
I'm worried that our listeners don't know what potash is.
When you talk about pot in Washington,
it can mean a whole lot of things, but we know-
It's a soil supplement.
What's it derived from?
You tell me.
I'm trying to-
Not ash, and it's not pot.
Yeah, I actually don't know.
But I know they do use it as a fertilizer, right?
Yes, it's a fertilizer.
And it comes out of Canada?
Yes, a lot of it comes from Canada.
I don't know the percentage, but a vast majority
of what comes to the U.S. in terms of potash.
Thank you, Mark.
I see him asking the Google gods.
He's got his handy little iPhone out.
That's the nice thing about a podcast.
You can just pop out your smartphone
and answer your own questions.
But I would say that in the time that we were gone,
I wanna tell a really long story.
I'm not gonna do it right now.
So in the time we were gone, this whole tariff idea
got some-
Mojo.
Mojo, right?
And by the time I landed, I have a home flock of chickens,
quite a large home flock, but I sell eggs
to colleagues and neighbors.
Are you getting rich on eggs right now?
I'm not.
I try to just cover the cost of the flock.
So we've been selling our eggs for $5 a dozen,
which I know is not very much money
with the current cost of eggs.
Can I get 12 dozen, please?
And on the flight home, I learned that when we were gonna
have to raise our price of eggs, $2 a dozen,
because we were gonna be getting our feed through our friend
who's actually a scale farmer, and he has some poultry,
and we're getting our feed through him.
And the tariffs, the Canadian tariffs,
the tariffs on goods coming from Canada,
we're gonna increase the cost of the organic feed
that we get from Western Canada by 25%.
Oh, wow.
And so that was gonna cause my tiny little egg hobby
to go off the charts.
So I went back and I updated the Post-It note
on the refrigerator in the county office and said,
eggs are now $7 a dozen.
Oh my, wow.
Still a good deal though.
All because of a potash tariff.
Well, but that's a really good example of how something
that a lot of people may not be familiar with, right?
Can be actually an integral part of a system,
and it can have a really big significant impact
on kind of the inputs that go into that system
that spit out a product that at the end,
now you're gonna end up paying a lot more for.
And it feels like, sorry Mark,
it feels like they're not thinking about this.
And I'm not trying to be like doomsday or anything,
but it feels like there's not a lot of,
what is this gonna impact?
What actually is, what impacts are gonna be caused
by this shift?
And I feel like that is something that's been frustrating.
Yeah, yeah.
I was just gonna note that one of the more interesting
sessions to me at the conference,
there was a panel of a handful of locally elected
Canadian officials, essentially some of our peers
and colleagues to the extent that there's parallels.
And they really spent a lot of time talking about
all of the ties that our countries have,
just things small and large,
and trying to remind the audience how important it is
for us to try and be thoughtful about the deep connections
between our countries.
Yeah.
What'd you learn about POTUS, Mark?
It's an or that's mined and that I wish
Commissioner Swanak were here to tell us more.
He probably would know more.
Well, thanks for joining me today.
I know there's probably a lot more to talk about
and there were certainly a lot more issues
that NACO brought up that they wanted us to kind of mention.
Commissioner Ozai, it looks like you got something
that you wanted to add.
Yeah, I just wanted to add something.
I don't know if this will be a bright spot,
but it's a potential bright spot.
One of the other things that we were there to talk about
was how effective direct distributions to counties
and local governments as what happened with ARPA
are as opposed to dollars funneling through state agencies
and then down to local governments.
Okay, when you say ARPA, you mean the?
The American Rescue Plan Act, which was the COVID,
one of the responses to COVID.
And that was very unusual in that the federal government
just issued allocations to counties and cities
over a certain size and we had broad flexibility
with regard to how to spend those dollars.
And so that was such an effective program
because it allows every community to be responsive
in a very short, quick period of time
based on what their community's needs are.
And I'm at least a little bit hopeful that that message,
because it reduces bureaucracy, it reduces overhead,
might be actually a message that might get some traction
with the new administration.
Yeah, that's something that we always advocate for
just because it gets more direct service dollars
to actually be in projects on the ground,
providing for residents in the way that it was intended
rather than just kind of caught up in administrative costs.
When you're passing it from agency to agency to agency
to finally getting it to where it needs to be,
that's a whole lot less efficient
than it is to just go direct to whomever that provider
needs to be in giving those dollars directly.
So hopefully that message resonated
and it's something that we always advocate for
on the local level too with the state.
So, well, Commissioner Eisenhower,
was this your first legislative conference with NACO?
Or had you been there before?
My second.
Oh, it was your second?
My second.
So was it as good as your first one?
Did you feel like you got just as much out of it?
Each time you do something, you learn a little bit
about how to really make it more effective.
And this time, I focused on getting meetings with staff
who were the office, the Congress person or the senators
to lead on the issue.
And so we, Mark and I both met with Senator Murray
and Senator Cantwell's staff who would be able to give us,
shine the most light on the roads on the West End.
We have roads failing going into the whole rainforest,
the Hall of Mosses and the Quinault entrance
to the National Park.
You're talking about Olympic National Park
for everybody who's listening.
So we met with natural resource staff and budget staff
and it was really a good use of time to meet
with those subject matter experts in the office.
And I think in the past, I was more maybe starry-eyed
about meeting with the Senator or the Congress person.
But this time I was like, no, we gotta meet,
the rubber's gotta meet the road after we leave here today.
So that's how people feel when they meet with you, right?
The first time they're thinking, okay,
this is a local hero, this is a local elected official,
this is a famous person, right?
Local and it's easy to get caught up in that.
But the second or third time,
they just wanna call you by your first name
and ask you why you're not getting it done, right?
Usually I call the county commissioners
the complaint department.
Well, that's probably what you are.
We get the most constructive feedback
of anyone in the county, I believe.
So it's funny you mentioned the Hall of Mosses
in Olympic National Park.
I've been there before, but only once when I was a kid.
And I remember it being kind of awe-inspiring
and a little disorienting,
because after a while,
you get into the Hall of Mosses a little bit.
If there wasn't a path, you'd turn around
and you'd be like, okay, this is cool,
but now it all looks the same.
And there's a lot going on here.
Which direction do I go?
And I'll be honest with you,
this was my first NACO legislative conference.
I'd never been before.
I never went as a county commissioner.
And I had never gone to staff
because generally it's gonna right in the middle
of our legislative session, which makes it really tough.
And I have to say, I felt at first a little bit like
my first time at the Hall of Mosses.
That was a big hotel and there were a lot of people there.
There were thousands of county commissioners
from across the nation.
It was a little overwhelming
to kind of get my bearing a little bit.
But after a little while,
I just kind of figured it's like any other conference,
just a little bit bigger.
But I found it to be really valuable.
What'd you think, Commissioner Ozais?
Yeah, I find it to be really valuable too.
And I was one who really questioned for a number of years
would it be worth it to my county taxpayers
and to this association to send me to Washington, DC
when all of our legislators and senators
have local staff people who are great and responsive.
And there is zero doubt in my mind
that it is incredibly valuable
because there are staff members who serve in Washington, DC,
have different expertise,
different technical areas of specialty
and often really appreciate having the chance
to build a little bit more familiarity with the district.
They might not be so familiar with the district itself.
And so everything happens in this business
based on relationships and taking a few minutes
to try and build those relationships with staff members,
make sure you have a connection
to the appropriate expertise for whatever your issue is,
is incredibly valuable.
Well, these legislators back in DC,
they really rely on their staff.
I think much more so than local
or even state legislators do.
And a lot of times their staff is not from Washington,
it's locally, right?
Or it's from other parts of the country.
So hearing from you guys about local issues
and that specific local knowledge
helps them make better decisions
and helps them better advise their elected official
that they work for who is familiar
with the local area.
But it's easy to kind of lose perspective
when you're all the way on the other side
of the country sometimes, that's for sure.
And you're trying to make deals, right?
You're trying to make deals
and sometimes you can forget about some of the details
that are really important.
So those local connections
and those local visits are really key.
So it sounds like you guys would do it again.
Yeah, I would do it again
and I would just say that my first legislative conference
that I went to,
I formed some friendship with commissioners
from around the state who I don't see.
They're not on LSC either.
And so I see them at the legislative conference.
And so commissioner Burroughs from Stevens County
and I went to dinner like three years ago, two years ago.
And it was like, again, there we were together
and a friendship was formed years ago
that is still enduring.
And I hear you guys and maybe commissioner Fuller
had an opportunity to go out to another,
shall we say social opportunity
where maybe there was some wine involved.
Yeah, but I was the good influence
and I said, let's not get the second bottle of wine guys.
So sometimes I can be sensible.
Good for you.
Commissioner Rosias, any final thoughts?
Well, if you have not been before,
I also would certainly recommend attending.
And if you take a few minutes ahead of time to try
and get some visits lined up for yourself,
in addition to what you're doing
on behalf of the association,
that's a really great way to take full advantage
of your time there.
Well, that's really good advice.
Last thought, my best outcome of this trip
was getting to know Mark better.
Oh, likewise.
Yeah, we teamed up for all those meetings
and had a really productive time together.
And we are neighbors on our peninsula.
And I think that will endure our good work together
will lead to good stuff in the future.
Well, that's great to hear.
Counties that are next to each other
that share borders, share a lot of interests.
And so having good relationships between colleagues,
not only is better personally for you,
but is also better for your residents
and better for the regions that you guys serve.
So good for you.
Welcome back.
I'm sure you're a little tired.
I know I'm a little tired.
There's always kind of that jet lag
coming from the other side.
I hope you can get some rest
and I hope you get a chance to see your families
this weekend.
Don't worry, Paul, when the time changes this weekend,
it'll fix everything for us.
I don't believe you,
but we're gonna call that the last word.
Thank you so much for joining me today,
Commissioner Ozayas and Commissioner Eisenhower.
Great to see you.
Great talking to you.
Hopefully we can have you back again,
but until then, take care.
Thanks, Paul.
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