Mental Health Region restructures board

MARENGO — Iowa County Supervisors won’t have a representative on the East Central Mental Health/Disability Services Region this year after a state mandate forced restructuring.

Mae Hingtgen, CEO for the East Central Region, told Iowa County Supervisors last week that county supervisors can’t make up more than 49% of the Region board.

Hingtgen put together a subcommittee to restructure the board to meet new requirements. They created a 13-person board with six supervisors from the nine member counties. The other seven board members will come from the member counties but will not be county supervisors.

A rotation system will keep county supervisors from losing track of what’s going on in the Region, Hingtgen said.

The committee felt it was important to the stability of the leadership to keep Linn and Bremer County Supervisors on the board because they are chair and vice chair this year, said Hingtgen.

The committee put the other counties in alphabetical order: Benton, Buchanan, Delaware, Dubuque, Iowa, Johnson and Jones. The first six counties will have Supervisors on the board this year. The last three will not.

The first term of the newly organized board will be 18 months to get the cycle on the correct calendar year, Hingtgen said. After that, each term will be for one year.

Each year, county supervisor membership will rotate so that three remain the same, three are new, and three are not on the board.

Any given county will be off the board only 12 months. “Twelve months goes pretty quick,” Hingtgen told the Iowa County Supervisors.

Other board members will be adults with lived experience or adult providers, parents of children with serious emotional disorder, children’s providers or people in education, the judicial system or law enforcement.

The county supervisors who aren’t on the board can watch meetings on Zoom.

Hingtgen said she quoted Iowa County Supervisor Jon Degen at a meeting. All of the counties care about all the other counties, Degen had said, and Iowa County will be taken care of in its off years.

To keep counties without representatives engaged, the committee tries to choose the remaining seats from the non-represented county. The Jones County Supervisor is off the board, but the County Attorney will be on it.

The Region is looking for a parent or guardian with a child with serious emotional disorder to fill one board position. “I’d love to get one from Iowa County,” said Hingtgen.