Jones County health officials renew request for restored funding as staff warn of service delays

Jones County health department officials and district staff asked the Board of Commissioners on Feb. 4 to restore previous county funding levels, saying reduced contributions and rising costs threaten staffing and routine public-health services.

The request came during the meeting’s new-business segment when a health department staff member described the department’s role in overdose prevention, outbreak response and routine services and Sylvia Woodford, district financial administrator for the North Central Health District, asked the board to restore roughly $89,000 in annual support that had been requested last year but denied.

Woodford said the department’s "average monthly cost to operate the Jones County Health Department is roughly, a little over 76, thousand a month" and that the department has about one-and-a-half months of reserve on hand, below its usual target of four to six months. She said the county-funded portion of the department’s budget has fallen and the department used reserve funds to complete a recent facility renovation.

Dr. Thomas Craft, who identified himself as district health director for South Central Health District and interim district health director for North Central Health District, said the county’s per-person spending on public health is low. "Currently with with the funding that Jones County is is is giving a local health department, Jones County is only spending about 49¢ per person per year to support public health in in your county," he said, and urged the board to consider returning to the prior funding level (about $110,000 annually, he said) to align Jones County with other counties in the district.

Environmental health staff also described routine but critical work the county does off the public radar — responding to gastrointestinal and flu outbreaks in nursing homes, investigating failing septic systems, handling suspected rabies exposures and guiding food-service facilities after storm-related power or water outages. The speaker warned that without added funding, the department faces cuts that would slow construction and septic permitting and lengthen processing times.

Several commissioners said they value the department’s services but asked for more financial detail before changing county contributions. One commissioner requested a comparison of service volumes before and after the health department’s renovation to quantify whether the facility improvements increased service capacity. Commissioners asked staff to provide two years of data before construction and two years after to help justify changes in funding.

No formal funding change was made at the Feb. 4 meeting; department leaders were told the board would review the request during the county’s budget process and consider the financial data requested.

Ending: Health department leaders said they appreciate the board’s willingness to review the numbers and emphasized that gaps in staff or funding would slow permits and services that they said protect public health in Jones County.