Duck Creek Road Improvements In The Works

Valley County will apply for $5 million in federal monies to make improvements to Duck Creek Road via the Federal Land Access Program (FLAP).

“It is available to us because it accesses federal lands,” Mary Armstrong, Valley County commissioner, said during a discussion and decision meeting at the courthouse on April 14. “We have agreed to provide a $50,000 match. A13.64% match is required.”

US Fish and Wildlife Services will provide about another $267,000 for the project and the Army Corps of Engineers about $220,000, Armstrong said.

“In exchange for us getting this improvement, the county will agree to maintain the road as a county road,” she said.

Improvements will include widening and repaving the current paved section, straightening and potentially paving the segment from Poverty Ridge Road to Millionaire Mile, removing some of the elevation on the hill down towards Duck Creek Road, and potentially adding more gravel between the Duck Creek boat launch and Highway 24. Other measures would include applying dust control measures to the ground.

FUNDING FOR

CONGREGATE MEALS

In other news, the three commissioners voted to approve reallocation of $11,250 in funding from the fiscal year 2021 budget to help provide congregate meals for impoverished senior citizens. The meals are provided by Action for Eastern Montana, Council on Aging, which provides services to anyone 60 or older and their spouse regardless of age.

“Because we are in a COVID year, we are allowed to move money where we are not spending allocations ,” Armstrong said. “When we look at our finances, and where we are spending money, we are underspending [at the] Senior Center. We are only at 56% of spend. We should be at 75%.”

There is approximately $5,000 in unspent funding, Armstrong said, which can be earmarked for congregate meals.

An additional $5,000 also can be transferred from the caregiver budget, plus a 25% match from the county.

Without the reallocation, the budget for congregate meals only retains about 10% of the funding originally approved for the current fiscal year.

With the additional funding, the meals will continue unabated, Armstrong said.

“We would be in pretty good shape to continue congregate meals in Nashua and elsewhere, and we could do a better calculation to [determine] at what point to go to two meals a week.”

EMPATH UNIT AT

HOSPITAL NIXED

An item on the agenda concerning the creation of an EMPATH unit at the Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital (FMDH) was removed from consideration due to lack of participation from the hospital.

The unit, which would have provided services for patients in mental or emotional distress, was slated to have been paid for by a county-tribal matching grant and overseen by Frontier Psychiatry. The organization, founded in 2019, trains and supervises psychiatrists in underserved communities via telemedicine.

“The EMPATH units are basically a room and a process,” Armstrong said. “If somebody in mental or emotional distress comes into the emergency room, the medical staff would identify them as such and move them to a separate room where, within two hours, the frontier psychiatry organization would telemedicine in and provide service and evaluation of this individual and also decide what the next steps would be so this person could either be admitted or sent home because they weren’t a risk to themselves.”

The EMPATH room could not proceed without the full support of FMDH, which signaled a lack of interest at this time, Armstrong said.

The program “was being spearheaded through Eastern Montana Community Mental Health Center, which wanted four counties — including Valley County — to come in an apply for the grant in order to implement these empath units in the four hospitals, including FMDH. The major player here is FMDH, and FMDH, as of earlier this week, said they are not interested in pursuing this opportunity at this time.”