Health department axes array of jobs, programs

El Paso County will no longer inspect daycare centers or test for diseases such as West Nile Virus because of a sweeping round of layoffs announced Thursday.

The El Paso County Department of Health and Environment is laying off 23 people, going to a four-day workweek and cutting five vacant positions effective Jan. 1 to help cut $1.68 million from its budget. The cuts mean an end to several inspection and monitoring programs, and a blind eye will be turned to many common public complaints. The layoffs come on top of about 10 positions that were eliminated earlier this year.

Since January, the department has lost 18 percent of its staff and nearly15 percent of its budget. The health department is mostly funded by state and federal money, but its core services rely on county dollars, which will be $2.8 million in 2009. The health department cut $500,000 earlier this year, but the additional reductions are needed because it’s drawn down its emergency savings too far.

“I think it’s a dangerous situation,” said El Paso County Commissioner Sallie Clark, who serves as the county’s liaison for the health department. She and acting public health director Kandi Buckland blamed the cuts on the Election Day defeat of a sales tax measure designed to offset lost revenue for several county departments.

Programs and services to be eliminated include:

• Childcare inspections for the county’s 400 licensed facilities. In addition, the department will no longer respond to complaints against daycare centers, except in cases of high-risk diseases or outbreaks, and it won’t educate centers about food preparation, diapering, containing diseases, or other issues that came with its routine inspections.

•Testing and monitoring of animal-to-human diseases such as West Nile Virus, plague and rabies. Limited investigations into hantavirus and human exposure to rabies will continue.

•Air-quality monitoring, including environmental reviews for planned developments.

•Swimming pool inspections and unincorporated groundwater inspections.

•Fielding health complaints about garbage.

•Monitoring of sexually transmitted diseases or their spread.

Some of the cuts may violate state law. But the law is vague when it comes to public health, said Dr. Ned Calonge, chief medical officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Air-quality monitoring, for example, is used to determine whether Colorado Springs is in compliance with the federal clean air laws. If the county doesn’t do it, will the state be forced to step in? He said the news was still fresh, and there were many questions for the two agencies to sort through.

Before the latest round of cuts, the health department had eliminated meth lab inspections and a school safety program, and it scaled back disease investigations. It is also performing fewer than half its state-required food-service inspections.

Eliminated positions announced Thursday range from top-level management positions to clerical jobs. They include:

•More than seven full-time equivalents in administration, including a deputy director position and director of environmental services.

•Eight jobs in environmental health, including environmentalists and health technicians.

•Ten clinical services employees such as disease interventionists and program coordinators.

•Two people in health promotions for maternal and child health.

Only a few departments survived unscathed: public information, communicable diseases, two women’s programs and vital records.

Clark said the health department’s situation, like other county departments, could have been avoided.

“It’s a risk that we have to take because of the voters’ decision not to pass 1A,” Clark said. “Now here we are.”

But Daniel Cole, campaign manager for Citizens for Cost Effective Government, the group that pushed for 1A’s defeat, blamed the health department itself, saying it should have done more to earn voters’ trust. He questioned why it would not touch its public information department but ax its other services. Buckland has said public information becomes more important when there are fewer workers to handle inquiries or educate the population.

The full impact of the cuts is unclear, but there is likely to be some increase in illness without the department’s preventive efforts. Consider STDs, with about 3,200 reported cases each year. The health department will no longer investigate such reports to notify possible contacts, something that is predicted to lead to wider spread.

And last year, health inspectors in El Paso County shut down 100 pools for being unsafe; six contained E.coli.
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Contact the writer: 636-0198 or brian.newsome@gazette.com