The engagement has been announced and a wedding date set, but the proposed union of the city and county health departments may not pan out to be the quickie Vegas ceremony Mayor Karen Hasara wants it to be.
For starters, the mayor’s main selling point–the claim that a merger with Sangamon County’s health department would be financially beneficial to the City of Springfield–may prove untrue, according to sources inside the city health department.
Ward 2 alderman Frank McNeil even suggests that, considering current and future grants, the city health department might be not just self-sufficient but actually profitable.
Finally, since the proposal before the City Council is less a merger than a takeover, there’s a certain amount of squeamishness involved. After all, aldermen would be deeding a venerable 170-year-old agency–the oldest health department in the state–over to a 12-year-old upstart. But the mayor wants the council to make this irreversible decision quickly.
“What’s the rush?” asks Ward 4 alderman Chuck Redpath. “Once we lose our status as a certified health department, we cannot get that back. So we need to proceed cautiously.”
The proposed merger, scheduled for a vote on Tuesday, would give Springfield’s buildings and duties to Sangamon County, saving the city $1.3 million in the first year. But the city would have to pay the county more than $900,000 annually starting in March 2004, and that sum would rise by 3 percent every year thereafter. Meanwhile, Springfield residents would continue paying a “general health fund levy,” which amounts to more than $700,000 to the county every year.
Redpath sees no savings for Springfieldians.
“City taxpayers would be paying twice as much as county residents. We would pay a city tax for health services into the corporate fund, and also a county portion. County residents would pay only the county tax,” Redpath says.
McNeil says if a merger is such a great idea, let the city swallow the county health department. “I always reverse the question,” McNeil says. “We could take over the function and absorb their people and the savings then would be realized.”
Current county health department director Jim Stone would control the new conglomerate, while the city health department director Ray Cooke would run an office of “bioterrorism preparedness” for the county.
Cooke declined to comment on the specifics, but says he is preparing a cost-benefit analysis at the request of some council members.
The proposed merger has attracted the attention of at least one mayoral candidate, Tim Davlin, who is so strongly opposed to the merger he plans to propose changing the city’s fiscal year, which traditionally starts on March 1.
“The first mistake is jamming this down everybody’s throat,” he says. The requirement to finalize the city’s budget by March 1 is found only in a local ordinance that could be changed, Davlin says. A state statute requires city budgets to be approved by May 30. Adjusting the fiscal year to start after elections would save the budget process from the control of lame-duck councils, Davlin says. He suggests moving the date back by two months and adopting a temporary budget to cover the transitional period.
“Sixty days to change the future of Springfield,” he says.
He also doesn’t buy the pro-merger argument that a larger population base would make a consolidated agency eligible for more grants. In fact, certain grants, such as the State of Illinois’ women’s health grants, are parceled out one per agency. Since the city and county health departments each have one of these $38,000 grants, a merger would mean a loss of $38,000. Other grants are available for populations with a certain percentage of minorities, and Davlin says Springfield’s 15 percent minority population diluted by the whiter Sangamon County population would bring a consolidated agency’s percentage down into the single digits, possibly disqualifying it for minority grants.
Davlin also says, and sources inside the city health department confirm, that Springfield is in line for some major grants that the city could not control with the county in charge.
He also disputes the county’s promise that a consolidated agency could maintain all the services currently provided by the city health department–the neighborhood nursing project, for example–and offer these services county-wide.
Davlin even believes there’s a chance for the city to re-claim the $700,000 annual contribution taxpayers make to county health services, especially, he says, if he is elected mayor. “It’s a legislative matter,” he says. “With a Democratic governor and a Democratically-controlled state legislature, who do you think is going to have a better chance of making that happen? A Democratic mayor!”
Which brings up the inevitable matter of politics. A merger would mean control of Springfield’s health department would shift from the City Council–currently half Democratic, half Republican–to the heavily Republican county board. But Davlin swears that’s not his main objection.
“This would be a great deal for the county, and a pathetic deal for the city,”
he says. “They’ve got to quit raiding our city gems.”
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2003.
