Will Ottawa County Cut Its Health Department Budget To $ 2.5 Million?

This story is garnering national and state attention.  The Washington Post covered the sex ed angle of this situation on Sunday:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/michigan-sex-educator-culture-wars/

BridgeMI recapped the MLive and Washington Post stories yesterday:

https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/long-simmering-battle-over-public-health-comes-head-ottawa-county

WOOD-TV covered the response of Administrative Health Officer Adeline Hambley to the proposed Ottawa County budget cuts.  Hambley went to some length in her response  to threaten the people who require permits from her department, a form of extortion much beloved of American bureaucrats:

https://www.woodtv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2023/08/2023.08.24-FY24-Budget-Reduction-Request-Follow-up.pdf

The WOOD-TV story on Hambley's response is more readable:

https://www.woodtv.com/news/ottawa-county/health-officer-slashed-budget-would-shutter-ottawa-health-department/

Health officer: Slashed budget would shutter Ottawa health department
By Rachel Van Gilder - August 24, 2023

OLIVE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — Ottawa County’s top health officer says her department would survive only a matter of weeks if commissioners go through with a proposal to slash its budget.

Administrative Health Officer Adeline Hambley on Thursday released a response to a request from Ottawa County Administrator John Gibbs to present a budget limited to $2.5 million in general fund dollars. She was instructed to prepare an outline of spending under that limit by Thursday.

“Every public health program will be at risk under the unreasonable general fund budget allocation requested by Administrator Gibbs on behalf of the Board of Commissioners,” Hambley wrote in the document.

She described the limitation as “significant and retaliatory,” referencing her lawsuit against county commissioners backed by conservative political action committee Ottawa Impact for trying to oust her.

She also argued Commission Chair Joe Moss — who formed Ottawa Impact after the health department shut down his kids’ school over COVID-era mask mandates — was trying to “achieve political victory over COVID-19 at the expense of Ottawa County citizens.”

Hambley presented a spreadsheet indicating that between 2009 and 2020, the health department received no less than about $3.4 million from the general fund. For the 2020 fiscal year, implemented before the pandemic started, it got about $3.7 million. About $1.1 million went to administrative costs, bringing the amount sent directly to public health services for that fiscal year to about $2.6 million.

In the document, Hambley argued that if bound to a $2.5 million budget in the upcoming fiscal year, there would be two likely outcomes:

First, if the department maintained only essential services and mandated public health administration, it would close in four weeks. That would be the end of October because the new fiscal year starts Oct. 1.

In the other scenario, the department would send all its available dollars to essential services that may not charge fees: hearing screening, vision screening, immunizations and waivers, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, and the communicable disease program. They would make it seven weeks after Oct. 1.

At the same time, programs that may charge fees would remain — but those fees would triple to make the programs self-sustaining. Fees for food safety inspections would increase from $700 to $2,100 per license. Fees for a drinking water well permit would increase from $400 to $1,200 and new sewage disposal permits would increase from $535 to $1,605. Fees for inspections of wells and sewage systems before a property sale would increase from $300 to $900.

Hambley said that under a $2.5 million budget, about 67% would go to fund administrative expenses. She said that would “not meet the minimum maintenance of effort to provide mandated programs as is required by law.”

“These cuts do not save taxpayers money but serve to reduce services that the County is required to provide to protect the health and safety of the community,” Hambley’s response to Gibbs reads in part. “It strips citizens of the services they are guaranteed under the law and the rights they are granted under the Michigan Constitution. These actions are not fiscally conservative but fiscally, and legally, irresponsible.”

Hambley also criticized an instruction to present her budget “discontinuing all COVID-related grants,” saying that while those grants may have COVID in the name or description, “they are designed to cover various public health purposes including preventing the spread of communicable disease and health risks other than COVID-19.”

“This funding request at this level is a real threat to public health and safety in our community,” Hambley told News 8.

After Hambley’s response was released, News 8 reached out to Gibbs late Thursday evening, after regular business hours, seeking comment.

But on Wednesday, before Hambley completed her response, Gibbs told News 8 in a statement that it was “perfectly reasonable” to expect the health department’s budget to “match their average levels over the pre-COVID period.”

A public hearing on the budget is set for Sept. 12. Final approval will come Sept. 26.

Budget time has come to a boil in Michigan counties, and Ottawa BOC recently responded to the hue and cry of negative nationwide publicity (above).

Published by Board Chair Joe Moss, here is a sampling of the facts they present on cutting the Ottawa County budget back to pre-COVID levels.

Q: What is the budget process for Ottawa County?

A: The first budget draft for fiscal year 2024 was provided to the Finance and Administration Committee on August 1, 2023, built on the budget requests of county departments. This year, the Finance Committee added two public work sessions to the budget process.

The budget process includes the following:

• August 10, 2023, Finance Committee, Special Work Session
• August 21, 2023, Finance Committee, Special Work Session
• September 12, 2023, Public Hearing on the Budget
• September 19, 2023, Finance Committee to vote to forward a proposed 2024 Budget to the full Board of Commissioners
• September 26, 2023, Board of Commissioners to vote to finalize a FY24 budget for Ottawa County

As the Finance Committee considers the budget, adjustments are made based on details requested and provided by the Administrator, Fiscal Services, elected officials, appointed officials, and department heads.

A public hearing on the budget will be held on September 12, 2023. The Finance Committee will vote on September 19, 2023, to forward a proposed 2024 Budget to the full Board of Commissioners for consideration. A final budget will be voted on by the full Board of Commissioners on September 26, 2023.

......

Q: Were positions added for the COVID-19 response?

A: On 8/24/21, the prior Board approved $2.1M for 17 full-time, benefited positions, and 25 part-time non-benefited positions to respond to COVID-19. When these positions were approved in 2021, they were approved with the recognition that the positions were being used for the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

DPH’s total personnel is one-third higher than the last pre-COVID year, jumping from around 90, to a current level of 120, only a few years later. This 33% increase far outpaces County population growth and inflation over that period. This number should return to normal levels.

---

Q: Will Children’s Special Health Care Services or the Maternal and Infant Health Program be closed or services reduced?

A: Absolutely not.

Full article has graphs and much more.

https://joemoss.com/press-release-ottawa-county-budget-updates-for-fiscal-year-2024

So... What's up in your county??

Ottawa County Commissioners delivered a budget with only modest cuts to their health care budget.  Despite the scorched earth legal wrangling, the Ottawa Board of Commissioners is now moving ahead to fire their truculent Administrative Health Officer, with a few defections:

https://www.woodtv.com/news/ottawa-county/ottawa-county-board-to-consider-removing-top-health-officer/

Ottawa County board to decide whether to fire health officer
By Rachel Van Gilder - September 27, 2023

OLIVE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — A hearing has been scheduled for the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners to discuss removing Administrative Health Officer Adeline Hambley from her job.

The commission’s special meeting is scheduled for Oct. 19 at the county administration building in West Olive, according to a notice signed by Board Chair Joe Moss and dated Tuesday.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Hambley’s attorney filed motions asking the Michigan Court of Appeals to issue an emergency order to stop the hearing from happening.

“Moss, without the entire Board of Commission issuing the charges, intends to put on a sham hearing to fire Hambley,” one of the motions reads in part.

Moss and other commissioners backed by conservative political action committee Ottawa Impact have been trying to fire Hambley since they took office in January. She filed a lawsuit to stop the ouster. Current court instruction says she may not be fired without cause, as required by state law.

The document announcing the removal hearing lays out the actions that county leaders are now pointing to as cause, arguing Hambley has demonstrated incompetence, misconduct and neglect of duty.

The charges against her center around the recent battle over the health department’s budget for the upcoming year. The document says Hambley did not provide budget scenarios as requested and that she “made false claims” about the budgeting process and its effects, causing “confusion, anxiety, fear and panic.”

After being asked by county Administrator John Gibbs to create a budget limited to $2.5 million from the general fund, Hambley spoke publicly about how the dollar amount was not sufficient and released a document saying it would cause the Ottawa County Department of Public Health to close.

“Ms. Hambley knew that any request for proposed budgetary scenarios were not final or binding…” the notice of the hearing said in part. “Yet, instead of responding professionally and competently … Ms. Hambley ran to the media claiming that the Health Department may be shut down. Her actions incited fear and panic in the community.”

The charges in the document argue that Hambley acted “dishonestly” and “in bad faith” during the budgeting process. The notice says that if Hambley had concerns about proposed funding, she should have “worked towards a solution” with Gibbs but instead “attack(ed) and impugn(ed) his and the (board of commissioners’) motives.”

“While it is always acceptable to publicly criticize an officially proposed budget that has been presented to the Fiance Committee or the BOC, it is wholly inappropriate to present internal budgetary questions to the public as they are formal and/or finalized proposals and then stoke fear and panic based upon misrepresentations and misinterpretations of those internal and preliminary budgeting questions,” the document reads.

Hambley did not comment on the hearing for her removal, instead pointing to the response her attorney sent to the county’s counsel. The documents provided show David Kallman, the board’s attorney, emailed Hambley’s lawyer Sarah Howard shortly after 11 p.m. Tuesday to warn her that the notice for the removal hearing was forthcoming.

“I wanted to reach out and see if there is any interest from your client to resolve all her disputes amicably with one global resolution where the parties can go their separate ways,” Kallman wrote.

The answer to that question was no:

“(Hambley) is not interested in a negotiated resolution of her case which would involve her resignation or her removal as Health Officer,” Howard replied in an email Wednesday morning. “Accordingly, we intend to oppose the charges at the proceeding…”

In her motions filed with the Michigan Court of Appeals, Howard asked that the matter of the hearing be dealt with before Oct. 11, when the court is scheduled to hear arguments over Hambley’s suit against the commissioners. Her motion for a stay pointed out that in an order on Sept. 5, the court warned everyone involved “that they proceed at their own peril if they take substantial actions” before the Oct. 11 arguments.

“It only took three weeks for Appellant Joe Moss to take one of the ‘substantial actions’ about which this court cautioned,” the motion reads in part.

The hearing for removal, Howard said, will likely happen before the appeals court issues a ruling regarding what it hears Oct. 11.

“Appellants have made multiple public statements over the last several weeks indicating that they are likely planning a sham termination of Appellee Hambley, and now they have announced plans to move forward before this Court can realistically rule on the merits of the appeal in this case,” the motion for stay reads.

In her email to Kallman, Howard objected to the county’s “unilateral selection” of a judge to preside over the hearing and said she wanted to speak with him about how the hearing would work, including how testimony and exhibits would be presented and whether Hambley and Howard would be able to call their own witnesses. In her motion to stay, she said she will need time before the hearing for discovery and to subpoena witnesses.

“Even if Appellants’ act was not an attempt at an end-run around this Court, which it is, there is no way for Appellee Hambley to have a hearing which comports with the federal and state due process required by October 19, 2023, in any event,” the motion says.

Commissioners passed the county’s budget early Wednesday after an hourslong meeting. It allocated $4.8 million to the health department for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. Hambley had asked for $6.4 million.

County leaders touted the budget as “fiscally responsible and the process as “the most transparent” in the county’s history, “incorporating for the first time an easier-to-understand format, information on grants and payments, and additional work sessions for Commissioners and the public to engage in the process,” Gibbs said in a statement.

Gibbs declined a request for an on-camera interview.

In a statement discussing the budget, not the hearing for removal, Hambley reiterated that it “includes cuts to mandated health education, and nutrition and wellness programs, as well as a reduction in funding for one epidemiologist for disease surveillance.”

Hambley told News 8 that she will try to limit the impact of those cuts.

“The bulk of our budget is people. There’s not a whole lot of operational excess or non-people costs that we can cut,” she said in an interview. “We are looking at some different options. If we can reduce hours or close external branches, that’s one of the few non-people costs I have. So we have a branch in Grand Haven that provides some services and we have one in Hudsonville.”

She said other departments have not been asked to make similar cuts to their budgets.

“Some of the commissioners ran on a platform of wanting to take action against the health department because of being angry about actions during COVID,” Hambley said. “I think that this is part of making that promise of retaliating against the health department for actions they didn’t like during COVID.”

Moss got involved in county politics and formed Ottawa Impact after the Ottawa County health department shut down his kids’ school in October 2020 for ignoring mask mandates.

In January, Ottawa Impact commissioners moved to replace Hambley with Nathaniel Kelly, who works as a safety manager at a Grand Rapids heating and cooling system service and repair company and who has criticized COVID-19 mitigation measures like wearing masks and social distancing. Under state law, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services must approve the appointment of health officers. As of Wednesday, MDHHS had not received an application for Kelly, a spokesperson told News 8.

Ottawa County's new board made one major cut very early when they wiped out the entire DEI budget.

Last year, this Simply American pseudonymous opinion piece filled in the gaps of Ottawa's DEI history. 

https://simplyamerican.com/how-the-ottawa-county-dei-department-came-to-be-a-conversation-with-the-founders

How the Ottawa County DEI Department came to be—A conversation with the founders

Published April 13, 2023   |   Written by Hamilton

In 2019, the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners launched the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Department, approving a budget of $1.1 million over 5 years. The department was created with funding from private donors and corporations, with the county contributing $631K of the expense.

At the time of this interview, the former DEI Director and her assistant had been on the job for about two years. When the department was dissolved in January of 2023, the yearly expense to the county had reached $286K.

Did the DEI Department improve Ottawa County as the founders intended?

Meeting The DEI Founders

It was Wednesday, June 30, 2021. As I walked through the empty parking lot, I could feel that summer had arrived in West Michigan. The sky had been mostly cloudy all day, hiding the late June sun, but the temperature was still in the 80’s. I was glad the conference room in the Ottawa County Fillmore Building would be air-conditioned. I had a meeting scheduled with the Ottawa County Administrator, Al Vanderberg, and with the Director of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Department, Robyn Afrik. Although we had been exchanging emails for a while, I had never met either of them in person. I was a little nervous. They had agreed to stay past their regular office hours to meet with me, so that I could pick their brains about the DEI office and its purpose in Ottawa County.

The door to the county building was locked, but one of the administrator’s assistants let me in and greeted me with a friendly smile. She showed me to the conference room. As I settled into my chair, I double-checked the questions I had jotted down and made sure my pen had plenty of ink.

Interestingly, my interaction with Ottawa County officials had not even started with DEI. Like many parents during COVID, I was concerned about health mandates, schools being shut down, healthy kids being forced to quarantine, and our Constitutional rights being violated. One thing had led to another, and as I followed the rabbit trail of government overreach, I came across another component of the problem: the county DEI office.

A few minutes later, Vanderberg and Afrik entered the conference room, offering warm greetings and kind handshakes. As far as people go, both seemed very friendly, professionally competent, and likable. It seemed like either would be a great next-door neighbor. In this article, I don’t want to make the discussion about them as people, as they both seem like wonderful individuals who genuinely believe the ideas they promote. They were not frauds or fakes. They truly believe in DEI and other leftwing ideas and wanted to use their authority within Ottawa County to promote those ideas. So I will refer to them as the former County Administrator and the former DEI Director. I would rather focus on the ideas than the personalities.

Why Was The DEI Department Started?

After brief introductions and small talk, the former County Administrator started right in with his defense of DEI and the reasons he and the former DEI Director started the DEI office and agenda in Ottawa County.

“When I started as the County Administrator,” he began, “I started meeting with the CEO advisory board of the Lakeshore Ethnic Diversity Alliance. I was in meetings with the biggest employers in Ottawa County. And there was a common theme: Ottawa County is not welcoming to people who are different from the cultural norm.”

These large employers told him non-white employees from outside of West Michigan would only last for about a year and a half. Then they would leave because of racist treatment.

“In some cases, their kids get picked on in school. I remember one of the stories that stuck with me was an international business guy who had an MBA. He is Hispanic. He did a lot of work for one of the companies in South America. But when he came here to Ottawa County, he was followed around in stores because people looked at him, saw he was Hispanic, and assumed he was going to steal something off the shelf. There’s just a lot of stories of that happening in Ottawa County.”

The former administrator went on to say that these large companies told him that if Ottawa County did not become more welcoming to ethnic minorities, the day would come when those businesses would expand or move elsewhere. It was a simple matter of needing to be able to attract the best talent to their companies. And prejudicial behavior in Ottawa County was scaring away the best talent.

Fast-forward a few years, and the former administrator had the idea of creating an official government agency within Ottawa County to address these problems: the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This office would solve the problems raised by the CEOs of West Michigan’s largest companies and help to prevent the racist behavior chasing talented minorities away.

What Did The Department Accomplish?

Now that I knew the origins of the DEI Department, I was curious to hear exactly what the former director had been doing that would prevent the type of racist interactions that chased away potential employees. What was Ottawa County government doing to prevent kids from being picked on in school because of their skin tone, or to prevent people from being followed in the grocery store because of their ethnicity? So I asked her about it.

“Obviously, when you start a new job and you’re in the first year, you have to understand what’s going on,” she said. “And then when COVID hit! Did anyone do anything the second year?”

I pushed further. It had been two years. What had the DEI office accomplished?

Both the former County Administrator and the former DEI Director stated that the main focus had been examining all county policies and procedures related to hiring county employees, and to providing services to Ottawa residents. They had been removing any implicit bias they found in those policies and procedures.

Implicit bias was a very big focus of their efforts and energy. They explained that implicit bias is bias that people don’t even realize they have. Like when an applicant for a job has an ethnic-sounding name, and doesn’t get the consideration that someone with a “normal” name would get.

I asked for specific examples. Did the former administrator see proof that the county had been biased in the past, before the DEI office was created? Had the county seen widespread bias or racism in its hiring practices? No. He said that he had not identified any specific bias or racism before, but that often times implicit bias is difficult to identify. So by creating a hiring process that was blind to gender and ethnicity, they could eliminate the possibility of implicit bias. It seemed pretty obvious to me that hiring for positions with the county should be as unbiased as possible. I wasn’t sure why it took a special, newly-created office to do this when it seems that it should be a normal function of the Human Resources Department.

In addition to making the hiring process less prone to bias, the former DEI Director pointed to other work as evidence of the DEI office’s good work. She was organizing the county’s “Diversity Forum” and spreading DEI initiatives to other local governments in Ottawa County.

Several things still did not make sense to me. The problems and solutions were not adding up.

Remember that the problem identified by the large employers who had approached the former administrator in the first place was related to people feeling discriminated against in grocery stores and at their kids’ schools. So the solution was to remove implicit bias in the hiring of county governmental employees? How does that prevent the MBA Hispanic guy from being followed around at Meijer?

I interrupted the conversation. “There seems to be a disconnect between your big business reason and what the county DEI office is actually doing.” I pointed out that making people “feel welcome” is a nice-sounding goal. But, in the end, it needs to be individual human beings, not government agencies, that make people feel welcome. The child at school who feels like an outsider will not feel better because there’s a county DEI office. The child will feel welcome when the other children in her class look past her skin tone and see her as an individual human being.

The former administrator was not convinced. He still believed that programs within institutions were the key to making people feel welcome. “The reason the corporations have programs, and the chambers of commerce, and universities, and governments, and even some churches is to make people feel welcome.”

And THAT right there was the key! Almost two years ago, during the meeting, I completely missed it. But reflecting upon that meeting now, I realize the key component that I was missing was VIRTUE SIGNALING.

The Real Purpose

The point of the DEI office was not to directly solve problems related to non-white employees leaving these companies (if that was even happening on a large scale in the first place). Both of these founders of the Ottawa County DEI office had admitted the work they were doing was mostly related to holding conferences, tweaking internal policies, and doing lots of networking with other supporters of DEI. It had nothing to do with preventing racism at Meijer. Although, as a side note, I have been in Meijer stores hundreds of times and seen hundreds of black and brown shoppers. I have never witnessed them being followed by store employees a single time.

The point of the DEI office was to send the “virtuous” signal that Ottawa County was jumping on the woke bandwagon. It was to make Ottawa County like all those other governmental entities, and universities, and big corporations that the former County Administrator had mentioned. “We care about DEI, too!” Likewise, the decision to join the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) was for the purpose of sending the same signal. (There will be more on GARE in future articles, Lord-willing.)

It was 100% about virtue signaling.

And that is a fundamental difference between the left and the right. The left is content to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to create and run a DEI office that is, at best, doing little more than virtue signaling. At worst, the DEI office is opening the door to further leftist ideology in Ottawa County, endangering our Constitutional rights and entangling our County government in a swamp of government overreach and questionable public-private partnerships.

On the other hand, Conservatives reject these big government schemes and quasi-governmental organizations. We recognize that if we want to end the problems caused by racism and prejudice, we need to teach our children to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. We need to see our neighbors as individuals first, with God-given individual rights, and not as members of artificial groups based on our chromosomes.

All things considered, the meeting with the former DEI Director and the former County Administrator was a good one. It was enlightening to see the role of DEI from their perspective. And their answers to my questions were highly informative. Likewise, their non-answers to some of my questions were as well, such as how the county’s relationship with GARE came to be.

In the end, when it comes to the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—taxpayer-funded virtue signaling has no place in Ottawa County.