From the Schaar’s Bluff Gathering Center, officials from Dakota County showcased the year’s achievements at the 2025’s State of the County on Monday, Sept. 22.
This year, commissioners spoke broadly about partnerships across the county ranging from public safety to mental health to workforce development.

Dakota County 911
The first partnership highlighted by the county was Dakota County 911. The 20-year-old program grew from the need of a centralized public safety answering point and dispatch center. To answer that need, Dakota County along with 11 cities created a single consolidated 911 emergency response system via a joint powers agreement.
“Today, Dakota 911 is one the busiest and most advanced public safety dispatch centers in the state,” said Dakota County 911 Executive Director Heidi Heiserich.
Dakota 911 processes an average of 800 emergency and non-emergency calls per day, sometimes as many as 70-100 calls per hour during peak call times.
Last year Dakota 911 answered more than 291,000 calls. Of that total call volume, 57% were 911 calls.
The program also uses a two-stage dispatch model which separates out the functions of emergency call taking and public safety dispatching.
“This approach allows our team to focus on a caller so the call taker can focus on their needs and providing emergency care or emergency instruction as needed, while their partner, the dispatcher is starting emergency services and coordinating that response,” said Heiserich.
“We have a true public safety partnership in Dakota County,” said Slavik.

Crisis and Recovery Center
The Crisis and Recovery Center in West St. Paul was another partnership highlighted at the event.
The new building opened its doors in February of this year, and is a partnership with Guild, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit mental health service provider.
The 16-bed center was built using trauma-informed spaces and features natural light, long sightlines and green space. It provides three service models: Intensive Residential Treatment Services, Crisis Residential Services, and Place to Go crisis treatment.
The building is located in the parking lot of Dakota County’s Northern Service Center and used a model commissioners hope to replicate.
“What Dakota County brought to the table is two things that I hope we can continue to model: we brought capital and we brought land,” said Commissioner Laurie Halverson.
In the seven months since the center opened its doors, 81 patients have received residential services, crisis services or a combination of both.
While the human impact of treatment for those 81 patients cannot be measured, said Guild CEO Trish Thacker, the offset financial cost can. Thacker estimated that compared to the cost of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization in Minnesota, if half of patients were able to avoid those fees, the program saved them a combined $1.2 million in only the first seven months of operation.
“It’s an active demonstration of the belief that everyone deserves health and well-being,” said Thacker.

Elections
Increasingly, even small local elections like those for school boards use county election infrastructure. ISD 200 voted last year to shift to even-year elections and thus take advantage of county elections as a cost saving measure.
Across Dakota County, 45 cities, townships, and school districts use Dakota County for absentee ballots, centralizing the process creating, “not only streamlined, but it’s actually made a more transparent process within elections,” said Slavik.
The centralization of absentee ballots comes as absentee ballots are increasingly popular. Many voters, especially young voters who began voting during the pandemic, have only voted early or with absentee ballots and prefer that convenience to waiting in lines on election day.
With that high volume, “It’s far easier when you have a single entity doing all the training and systems,” said Michelle Blue, Director of Elections at Dakota County.
“The county is the backbone to all of our elections,” said Slavik.

2026 Levy
The specter of budget cuts was not entirely absent from the otherwise upbeat night. Slavik, alongside County Manger Heidi Walsch, fielded questions on the then-upcoming maximum proposed property tax levy. That levy passed at the board meeting Tuesday, Sept. 23 and included $8.3 million in cuts and a 9.9% levy increase.
Slavik and Walsch were asked specifically about effects of federal cost shifts from The Big Beautiful Bill, signed by President Donald Trump on July 4.
Dakota County stands to pay a projected additional $9.85 million in 2027 from Medicaid work requirements and decreases in SNAP funding. The staffing requirements to process the new Medicaid work requirements are estimated to be $8.2 million of that total amount.
“We’ll need to add quite a few workers if we don’t want to get way, way, way behind,” said Walsch.
When it came to Medicaid eligibility, however, both referenced issues with state technology infrastructure: “It’s federal requirements, but the state technology system is making it even more difficult,” said Slavik.
According to Slavik, state systems still use DOS disk-based systems and require manual entry to data irrelevant to the task at hand like entering if new babies have a military record.
“I can’t overstate how antiquated the eligibility system is,” said Walsch, continuing “I think it’s a great opportunity to clean up the eligibility system.”