Human Resources
Good morning. Looking at the first resolution, I think that there are a lot of questions which should be answered before this is approved. This resolution seems to be about making the department’s budget look better by cutting vacant positions, creating a few new ones, and giving somebody a raise. The resolution is impulsive, poorly written and I don’t believe that this was, in fact, introduced through the Health and Human Services Committee.
First, why abolish the Deputy Director of Public Health position, which has only been vacated in the last month or so, to create an Assistant Director of Public Health position? Neither job description is listed on the Human Resources site at present, so what’s the difference between them? I’m pretty sure that civil service positions are not supposed to be created just so that a specific person with less qualifications can be hired for it, but this looks like that. Same for the vacant Community Health Coordinator position which is being sacrificed to create a Community Health Supervisor position. What’s the difference between these? This information should be available.
Under the core programs, what are the three positions being abolished? Do I have to look them up by number in the budget? And why do you need to create another Senior Health Educator position? I believe that there are already more health educators at Public Health than there has ever been before.
For the CHHA, why would you eliminate four nursing positions and four therapy positions? Yes, I know that it’s difficult to recruit and retain nurses into the CHHA, since that used to be my job, but don’t we want to keep trying? The CHHA currently has a little less than one half of the nursing staff that it did when I retired eight years ago and there will be some retirements in the future. Also, would somebody please explain to me why abolish four therapy positions and create a new physical therapy position.
Again, under D & T, which means Diagnosis and Treatment, meaning the sections of the department which deal with disease surveillance, epidemiology, communicable diseases, emergency preparedness, and more, this resolution proposes to vacate five nursing positions, one supervisory, because they have been “long vacant.” How long is that in real time? I know everybody has a short memory, but that part of the department was really important during the pandemic. We will need those positions. Let’s treat our nurses well to retain them and make Public Health a great place to work.
As far as the Director of Patient Services position, this is really a reclassification request and needs to have some kind of justification. It’s not that she doesn’t deserve a raise, because I’m sure she does. When I was DPS, the people I supervised made more money than I did, because I didn’t get overtime, and I think that maybe this still is a problem, but I don’t know because there is no information. A reclassification needs to have more explanation written into the resolution. Look at the next resolution from DPW for a good example.