Bonner County proclaimed 'hidden heroes county'

SANDPOINT — Bonner County has been declared a “hidden heroes county” after a proclamation was approved at the commissioners’ Tuesday morning business meeting.

Commissioner Luke Omodt proposed a military caregivers proclamation “in which we, as a county, will honor and support the caregivers of our veterans.”

The proclamation and subsequent memorandum would announce that Bonner County honors caregivers and works to establish an email list of caregivers for disseminating information, training opportunities and support to them.

“The nation provides multi-faceted support to our wounded, ill and injured veterans and service members through public, private and philanthropic resources, but their caregivers receive little support or acknowledgement,” the proclamation said.

Commissioner Asia Williams said she didn’t understand how the dissemination of a veteran caregiver email list would benefit the county and asked for further clarification.

“Is that being retained by your organization wherein we are collecting people that are identified as caregivers …?” she asked.

Tom Lindley, Bonner County director of Veteran Services, explained the verbage to Williams, saying that the department already has an email list of roughly 500 veterans to whom they send information.

“What we are going to do now is include information for support, education, opportunities, for the family caregivers as well,” he said.

Lindley said staff will go out into the community and ask individual veterans if they have a family caregiver. If they do, staff will see if that caregiver would be willing to be added to the caregiver email list.

“An alarming number of military and veteran caregivers, according to research, are suffering numerous debilitating mental, physical and emotional effects as a result of their caregiving duties,” the proclamation said.

His staff will also be working to search out more mental health and overall opportunities for the “unsung heroes in our community.”

“Most military and veteran caregivers consider the challenging work they do as simply carrying out their civic and patriotic duty, without realizing they are, in fact, caregivers, and do not identify themselves as such,” the proclamation said.

However, Williams said the way the memorandum is worded makes it sound like the caregivers' information would be disseminated, but Lindley said that is not the case as his team never gives out the personal information of anyone they work with. The director told Williams “it is a one-way street” of information, and that this memorandum will only see information being sent to their inboxes.

After a few more back-and-forth comments regarding the wording used in the memorandum, the proclamation was passed unanimously.

“Bonner County shall work in concert with the Idaho State Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, and in coordination with our local veteran service organizations to execute these tasks,” the proclamation said, “thereby ensuring Idaho's military caregivers are identified, acknowledged for their service, and supported wherever possible.”