Carbon County's domestic relations department is planning for the future.

The county commissioners have approved the five-year cooperative agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare and the county domestic relations department to maintain and improve the effectiveness of the Title IV-D Child Support Enforcement Program.The agreement will be from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, 2020.Commissioner William O'Gurek commended Mary Kunkel, director of domestic relations, for the work the department continually does to best serve the community.Domestic relations works to meet the goal of the federal program, which is to establish and secure financial and medical support obligations of minor children from parents who are not the primary caregiver of the child.In fiscal year 2014-15, the department collected almost $7.4 million in support for families.O'Gurek said the agreement includes incentives from the federal government for performance."From what I am seeing, the performance of our domestic relations department is exceptional," he said.Kunkel said the 11 employees in the department handle approximately 1,700 cases a year.The department is consistently performing better than the state standard of 80 percent collection rates in many of the performance measures that are regulated.Measures include establishing support orders, paternity establishment, collection of current support, collection of past due support and establish and enforce medical provisions for the child.The standard for each measure and how well the county performs over that standard is then used by the federal government when determining how much funding the county would receive to continue operating the services."We are required to meet performance measures to get the most from the federal government for services we provide," she said."We are on track for federal fiscal year 2015 to meet all of our performance measures again, which means we will get the best incentives from the federal government to support and run our programs."This in turn helps the county because it means that it is not taxpayer money being used to run our budget," she added.For example, in paternity establishments, the county stands at 107 percent, the establishing and enforcing medical provision stands at 96 percent and support collections are close to 85 percent.Kunkel said the 107 percent may be misleading because it is over 100 percent, but said it is due to additional data coming in that is not collected by the county courts."The state counts the number of paternities established throughout Carbon County, which means they don't necessarily have to come through the courts," Kunkel said."There are voluntary acknowledgements that parties can sign at the hospital that also get reported to the state and is counted into our number. That is why you see it more than 100 percent."