Health Foundation · Meeting · Oct 26, 2026

Scott Bentley. Here. Patty Hensary. Here. Chris Fitzgerald. Here. Steve Genoff. Here. Steve Hedcox. Here. Devin Peters. Here. Wow. Good timing. Devin Peters. First thing on the agenda is election of officers. Do I have any nominations for chairs? I'll make a motion Steve Hedcox will be chairman. I'll second. Do I have any more nominations? Steve Hedcox is elected chair. Does anybody say aye? All in favor? Aye. I'll turn the meeting over to Steve. All right, the next thing is the vice chair. I'll make a motion for nomination for vice chair. I'll nominate Zach Bentley. I'll second that. Any more nominations? All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say no. He's the vice chair. Public comment period. Did anybody sign that? Okay. Approval of the minutes from the last meeting. Thank you vice chair for your patience. Second. I'll make a motion to second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say no. Financial report. I'll make a motion to accept the financial report. Second. I'll make a motion to second. Tell us how much you don't know. The cash in the bank right now is $218,283.76. Any more questions? Is this a Monday? It's a roll call vote. Nick Bentley? Yes. Zach Bentley? Yes. Connie Estrey? Yes. Steve Giannopoulos? Yes. Steve Hathcote? Yes. Devin Pickard? Yes. Crystal Fitzgerald? Yes. All present voting yes. All right, it passes. Request for funding, Eaton County Fire. Mr. Tiggs. I hate to talk with y'all's backs. I'll walk over and... Thank y'all for the time to be able to come before y'all this afternoon. Two old faces on this board and everybody else new faces. If y'all got any questions, please ask. If there are questions, be in front of you. This is for our EMR program. This is a class I've come to this board a couple different times to get it paid for. This program gives our volunteer fire service the opportunity to go through medical training and actually get licensed to be medically advanced. It's not an EMT basic. It's not an advanced, so they can't go to work for the ambulance service. But what they can do is they can be the first responder. A lot of times when our ambulance service gets strapped, they get real busy. Sometimes that first responder is there by theirself five, seven, sometimes ten minutes. We looked into this program. We started doing it about 15 years ago-ish. It's worked out really well for our fire departments and our citizens because now we have medically trained first responders that are there on the scene. They're not just there to hold their hand. They can actually perform medical tasks. So this class pays for that training. It pays to get them ready for their national registry, all the things in the middle. That way it's not coming out of our volunteers' pockets. If y'all have any other questions, I'll ask. Is it an annual? We typically try to do one class a year. We have been successful at keeping the classes going every year because also with this class you have to keep CEU points. Any of our people that have been through the class before can come back, get their points during the points nights so that they can refresh and they don't have to go back through the class again. So yeah, we try to do one a year. Go ahead, sir. How many of these are new certs? New certs. How many of them are new? I think total on the class this year, I think we had seven new certs. So half the new certs and half are going for- They can be used to renew their license. Correct. It's an expensive way to renew your license, isn't it? Very. But I mean, I don't know exactly on the number. I'd have to prove all that. But I know we had at least seven whether or not they were qualified. I have a question. Has the class typically been funded in this way? So one year it was. So it was funded through EMA and the training budget, and it got to the point where there wasn't enough money there. So at one point in time, I think it was three years ago in the crystal-ish, they decided to move that to the EMS because it was medical, and now EMS is saying they didn't have it in their budget to pay for this class, so now it's falling back to here again. Okay. So who paid for it last year? Did y'all do it last year? Last year it was paid through. I don't think we paid for it last year because I looked back and I couldn't find it. Okay, so it would have been paid through EMS last year. Okay. The year before that would have been paid through this committee. It could have been paid through the fire association. How many CEUs do they have to have per night? Six, I think. Six hours? No, 16. It's a total of 12 hours, the way that it runs. So six CEUs is six hours. It's one CEU per hour, I think. It depends on what it is. Typically it's one CEU per hour. For some classes, it's a two-hour class for one CEU. It just depends on what they're refreshing on. I know they've got to refresh on their CPR first aid. They have to refresh on the hands-on medical trauma assessment. They have to have CEU points for that. So, I mean, typically, yes, you would take an hour to do that. But if you're in a classroom setting, you're there for four hours. I understand EMS doesn't want to pay for it. But at the same time, we have instructor coordinators at EMS. And for the ones that are going to renew, it may be much more feasible to have them come. And we did have a lot of training with us to get us CEUs. Correct. We're working on that program as well. We're trying to make sure it's coordinated that when EMS has a class, we have it on our calendar so that any volunteer fire service. The thing about the problem we have there, and y'all may understand this, you may understand this, our volunteer fire service guys are at work during the day. The only time they can train is nights and weekends. So we have to offer them training during nights and weekends, not during the day. And most of your EMS classes are daytime Monday through Friday, 8 to 4. Our guys can't get to those classes to get the points that they need. And that's in order to keep the locks in here, we have to offer other alternatives. How many hours is this class? That class? 180-ish hours. Almost ten and a half months long. If you want me to, I'll take up the baton on that and call up the RIC and see if there's any way we can schedule some evening classes or weekend classes or something for them because, you know, they're going to do 180 hours where they'd only have to do, just say, 10 hours to renew the license. And the renewals are not doing every day all the classes. They have set times. They say be here on Tuesdays from 4 or 5 until 9. That's your window. And you have two or three opportunities to be able to come into the class. They don't have to stay the whole 180 hours to get renewed. If you're going to get a new license, you have to be there the entire class. I have a question. Am I understanding correctly that this training certifies them to, like you said, be the first on the scene? And so, technically, if they don't have this and they're the first on the scene, how does their role change without the training? Or does the training change their role? The training does change their role because they can actually engage in medical response. Now, if they don't have this training, obviously, if it's a CPR progress, you've got CPR training, you can go ahead and start doing CPR. You can administer CPR. But anything beyond that, unless you've got medical training, part of this class teaches you that guidance. Don't go above your training. Go to your scope of training. So these guys are firefighters. They're hose pushers. And I don't know about y'all, but I don't want just an ordinary old firefighter in there doing medical work. You get out there and put the fires out. I want a medical training person doing medical work. They can't do much without this class. They can't take blood pressures, pulses, anything like that, without this class. So, basically, the only thing they'll do is assist, stuff like that. But, yeah, they can't do a lot without it. We can do head-to-toe assessments. We can go from medical to trauma. We can give radio to the inbound ambulance. We can give their blood pressure. We can give them what their heart rate is. We can give them signs of symptoms. We can give them all this. That's what this training is. And we're hoping to go to any basic really, really soon in this county because most of our fire departments now have got most of the responders on the agencies now have already made it to the EMR level. If they're going to, either that or they're just not medical. My goal is to work with EMS and hoping to get an empty basic class in this county so that we can go to that next level. And you've got people that possibly, if EMS needs an employee, we've got them right here at home where we've been training them the whole time. Then have to go to A&T. Then have to go to A&T, yes. But when you get the basic started, that's two steps out of the way. All right, what we have here is a request for 7,600 of us. Was there a reason why the last committee didn't grant it or did they just want to put it on the new? I think they said people were not the meeting. Oh, that's good. I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second. We have a motion and a second. Any more discussion? Seeing none, roll call. Nick Bantling? Yes. Zach Bantling? Yes. Tony Ansari? Yes. Steve Yanovich? Yes. Steve Hedcox? Yes. Devin Baker? Yes. Crystal Fitzgerald? Yes. All right, motion passes. Thank you all. You're welcome. The next thing on the agenda is new business. It's a request for funding for the Bernard Community Center. Mr. Skiggs. I'm Raymond Skiggs, board member at the Bernard Community Center. Here with somebody that's a board member as well. I want to first and foremost thank you for your initiative to start next year. This year, we want to do a seven-week program that addresses wellness in the community. We want to address three different aspects. We want to address mental health, physical health through exercise, and physical health through nutrition. We've designed a seven-week program to present to the community to address those issues. Any questions? So we funded this last year? It wasn't the exact same program. It was a similar program. What we just addressed was nutrition. This one addresses three different aspects this year. Have you all reached out to the 4-H extension and stuff? Emma, I forget her position, but she does some stuff like chair yoga and stuff like that. They're really finding it pretty beneficial. She will be a part of this. She's already given her address. Is this going to provide activities? Is this what this is going to do? The mental aspect of it, it's going to provide resources and ways for people to address their own personal mental health, but the activities will be like chair yoga or Tai Chi to address the physical exercise. So there will be physical activities held at the centers for people to go when they get home. Yes. So each day, it will be an hour-and-a-half of activity. And you said that will go on for seven weeks? Yes. Can you talk a little bit about, I know it's different for this one you're proposing, but the one last year, how many people participated and what were some of the activities that you guys did last year? So we did 10 weeks of nutrition. We had a nutritionist come in, and what she did was she taught how to make different meals that was nutritionally sound, like gluten-free, low-fat meals. So she would come in and she would teach actually about how this affects your body, and then they would actually go in and prepare that meal. I think we had between 10 and 15 participants, maybe. Do y'all have anybody interested in already that has reached out and asked about it? Do you have an anticipated number of how many might be interested in participating? Well, now that we're doing different aspects, we're doing mental and physical, I see more people coming because we're getting those kind of questions. And Emma Mars, who's been at Bernard for other classes, she'll bring the chair yoga and she'll bring all those different aspects which you were talking about as well. That's something that the community's been looking for, some physical activity. Something that's low impact. I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second. All right, we've got a motion by Mr. Ganonkos, and a second by Ms. Hester. Any more discussion? Seeing none, roll call. Nick Bentley? Yes. Zach Bentley? Yes. Tony Essary? Yes. Steve Giannopoulos? Yes. Steve Hedgcock? Yes. Devin Pickard? Yes. Kristen Hester? Yes. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. All right, the next thing over here is adjournment. Motion to adjourn. We've got a motion. Second.