Montana panel reports early progress on Justice Data Warehouse; Ravalli County data nearly ingested

Chair Usher convened the Criminal Justice Oversight Council on March 11, 2026, to hear a standing update on the Justice Data Warehouse, a cross-agency data initiative created by Senate Bill 11. Kayla Bragg, executive director of the Montana Board of Crime Control, joined Janice Friess, director of the Statistical Analysis Center, and Adam Carpenter, the state Chief Data Officer, to describe technical progress and next steps.

Friess told the council the warehouse was built to reduce siloed criminal-justice systems and enable better-informed policy and funding decisions. "The criminal justice data warehouse came out of some legislation, in senate bill 11," she said, adding that early use cases were chosen to yield quick, policy-relevant answers such as "who is the average user or person in the criminal justice system?" and whether car-theft has increased.

Carpenter outlined the technical approach and said the project does not ask agencies to change their operational systems. "We're not going to people and saying, hey, how you do your work has to change," he said, describing a model that captures existing records into a Snowflake cloud environment and uses modular ETL tools and a data catalog to govern definitions across counties.

Officials reported concrete ingestion milestones: Ravalli County data (CAD, RMS, JMS) are roughly 85% complete, and the team estimates the county feed represents about 1.6 gigabytes of raw records. Friess said a security review of user access was completed and the team is creating integration layers and test APIs with vendors such as Central Square to handle legacy data quirks.

The panel described the process for adding courts and other partners: scope-of-work conversations will be followed by MOUs, legal review and approvals before data sharing begins. Friess said the project is hiring a project manager and an additional data-warehouse architect and expects to present budget outlines (SB 11 and companion HB 117 items) at the council's June meeting.

Council members asked how they could help speed MOUs with local jurisdictions; Scott Twito offered to reach out to counterparts in target counties. Officials said some ongoing operational costs (for vendor API fees and cloud hosting) will likely be needed after initial funding, and the team will return with projected budgets and timelines.

The update closed with public comment from a Montana resident who praised the project's collaborative approach. The council asked the presenters to supply a written list of variables proposed for court data ingestion and to return with a June budget update.