BY BRIAN L. HUCHEL
Commercial-News
DANVILLE —
The Vermilion County Health Department hopes to return to a five-day work week as early as October after reaching an agreement on its 2011 budget.
Shirley Hicks, health department administrator, said Monday she would like to see the department go back to a normal work week the first full week of October — although the timeline is not set in stone at this point.
The health department began working four days a week with one furlough day following cuts made earlier this year as a result of the state being slow in repaying hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funds to the department.
Hicks, who took over as administrator at the beginning of July, said employees never wanted to go to the shortened work week. As a result, a number of programs already have become backlogged by the workload.
“We have the same requirements today as we did last year on five days,” she said. “The work has not furloughed.
“You just can’t sustain that long term,” she said.
The health department attempted to return to a five-day work week in its budget taken before the Vermilion County Board’s health and education committee in July. It was approved last week only after an agreement was made for the health department to pay at least half of a $300,000 loan the county issued to the department last year and renewed earlier this year.
The loan was originally issued to help the health department cover expenses as it waited for state payments to come in.
On Thursday, the health department made that payment — $150,000 plus a little more than $6,000 in interest.
Hicks said the health department will take a careful look at its funds in the coming weeks to prepare for the switch back and the costs involved.
“We want to make sure we have long-term cash flow available to us to make sure we can sustain that,” she said.
Sustaining the health department will be key as the agreement effectively shuts the door on additional support from the county down the road.
Board Chairman Jim McMahon pointed out that, as part of the agreement, the health department will not be allowed to come back and ask for financial assistance from the board if funds dry up.
“We accept that they believe they can make it,” McMahon said, adding he is confident in the numbers Hicks supplied the county in a meeting on Aug. 11. “We have said it time and time again — if you don’t make it, there’s no coming back.”
He said that under the original four-day work week agreement, the county was willing to help the health department if money problems were to arise again.
But floundering under a five-day work week would effectively put a padlock on the department’s doors.
“We bailed them out last year,” McMahon said. “We can’t bail them out next year when we’re using surplus funds.”
That said, McMahon did not anticipate any problems when the health department budget is brought before the finance committee as part of the county’s full budget proposal for the 2011 fiscal year, which begins Dec. 1. The plan at this point is for the board to cast a final vote on the budget at its monthly meeting in October.
McMahon also said he has been assured that the remaining $150,000 in the loan owed to the county will be paid off early in the upcoming fiscal year.
According to Hicks, the state is still issuing payments for money owed the health department. The money from those payments, which cover services rendered in January, will then be used to pay off the remainder of the loan.
The state’s debt to the health department is estimated at $450,000, Hicks said.
