1. Regional Child Support/interagency cooperative agreement

accomplishment of those projects certainly shows the commitment and effort to meet the legislative intent. At the County Social Service Director's meeting in May we struggled with how to support the legislative intent, support the state office and at the same time stay within our fjscal_ commitment. We belil?ve we. have come_up with a solution. - "- - - As you also know, the County Social Service Directors, by motion in July, 2005, agreed to set aside in the 2006 County Budgets an amount of 5% of the estimated child support incentives to be received in 2006 for special centralized projects in child support. These funds were budgeted in all regions as directed by the Department. (The projection at the time was that counties would receive around $715,000 in incentives for CY 2006, now it appears that amount may be closer to $1,000,000). Because the total cost of both proposed agreements require commitment of significantly more funds than are in 2006 county budgets, county social service board/commission approval will be necessary to sign the agreements. . After considerable review and discussion of the projects, the County Directors- Association believes that at this point we can only move forward with the one project, the Asset Seizure Project, since that budget would be within the limits of the 5% of incentives set aside by counties for special projects. In doing this we believe we would be supporting the legislative intent since they did not indicate how many projects needed to be implemented and also supporting the state office in their efforts of putting this process together. As for moving forward, we understand the Administrative Rules need to be approved before any further incentive distribution can take place and we understand the Rules will be before the Rules Committee on June 12, 2006. Counties need to have Written assurance of the amounts of child support incentives that will be provided in CY 2006 and the date of that distribution/s before we can move forward with committing any of those dollars. After that has happened and we come to agreement on the Contract changes we would be ready to move forward to signing the contract and starting to implement the project. We want to continue to worK with DHS in developing these child support special projects, pursuing resolutions to the funding dilemmas and making the program. more effective while maintaining cost efficiencies. We look forward to your consideration of this matter and look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Mr. L. J. Bemhardt, President