The GEO Group, Inc. hosted a quarterly Community Relations Board Meeting on August 23 at the Strand Theater in Jena to not only offer updates regarding the LaSalle ICE Processing Center but to receive updates from the community and business leaders in attendance. Due to an unexpected deployment to another facility, Facility Administrator Shad Rice was unable to attend, so in his stead, Assistant Facility Administrator Lisa Bowen led the meeting. She thanked everyone for being there and explained that their goal in holding the quarterly meetings is to bring together community leaders and business owners to discuss community successes and challenges and pursue unity. The luncheon was catered by Bowen’s BBQ and Bowen thanked the caterer and Sheila Mason with The Strand for helping provide for the meeting. “The pandemic has had a severe strain on our abilities in the past two and a half years, but I know more than ever we want to move on from that,” Bowen said. “I know I speak for our facility and for the company that we want to become more involved with community projects and development in any areas we can assist in. We want to be the best partners we can be, so if there is anything that comes up you want us to know about please let the warden know and he will present those ideas and we will see what we can do.” She then updated those in attendance on a couple of things that have happened at the facility over the last quarter. “We’ve had a couple recent facility-wide inspections. We did a very good job on our inspections which is always wonderful,” she said. “We also had some great guidance on how we are to handle our COVID precautions. Now we are under the stop light status as we call it, so we are either at red, yellow or green levels depending on a couple of factors.”