PHOTO: HDIC chair Mozhdeh Bruss (left) and SJBPH Board of Health Vice President Karin Daniels at the October 13 joint meeting. Image from UnitedForFreedom.us via YouTube.
As noted previously in this editorial series, the Archuleta County Health District Investigative Committee had a lengthy, 2-hour meeting on October 13 with the leadership of the San Juan Basin Public Health — the agency that provides certain types of health services in La Plata and Archuleta counties. SJBPH Board of Health President Ann Bruzzese, Board Vice President Karin Daniels, and SJBPH Executive Director Liane Jollon fielded dozens of questions from the committee members during those two hours.
If you want to listen to the entire 2-hour meeting, it was posted on YouTube by local video producers UnitedForFreedom.us
Over the past weekend, I spent some time listening to that video and trying to understand the conflict that brought about the creation of an investigative committee which includes Adam Talamante, Susan Kleckner, Mike LeRoux, Mozhdeh Bruss, Marybeth Snyder, Leslie Davis and LaVonda Bass, with County Commissioner Warren Brown often attending as liaison with the Board of County Commissioners.
(I find it a bit odd… that Commissioner Brown is serving as HDIC liaison, considering the fact that his fellow County Commissioner, Alvin Schaaf, serves on the SJBPH Board of Health as the BOCC’s representative, and presumably has a deeper understanding of the issues. But our local governments do not always behave the way we might expect, for various reasons.)
At the earlier September 28 HDIC meeting, according to the meeting minutes, Commissioner Brown “mentioned the short time-frame the committee has to obtain its assigned goals. The committee needs to find facts to the best of its ability.”
The deadline for the committee to present its findings is apparently “early December.” The committee’s three key assignments (according to Commissioner Brown) are:
1) Obtain from SJBPH what services are provided at what cost;
2) investigate the feasibility of creating a county public health entity;
3) investigate the viability of partnering with a neighboring county’s public health entity.
Commissioner Brown told the committee, if they can’t get the answers to #1, they should move on to #2 and #3.
Presumably, the HDIC members did indeed obtain a considerable amount of information, previous to, and during, the two-hour October 13 session with the SJBPH leadership, even though the conversation may have barely scratched the surface.
Here’s HDIC chair Mozhdeh Bruss, speaking to the SJBPH representatives:
“We’ve reached out to you, to try and understand your services, your structure. I think we’ve spent quite a bit of time on our own, and you’ve provided us with some documents and we’ve read through them, and Leslie [Davis] has continued to go deep into those documents. So we came back and reviewed them together, and tried to answer some questions. I’ve attended all three of Liane [Jollon’s] budget presentations, and by the end of the presentations, I feel like I understand the information pretty well… ”
SJBPH is a $6.5 million agency with over 60 staff, serving two counties spread over 3,056 square miles with a joint population of 70,000 people… in the midst of a new spike in COVID cases.
The comments from the HDIC members during the 2-hour discussion often centered on ‘communication’, with an implication that SJBPH is doing a poor job of communicating with the Archuleta County community.
Speaking as a person who spends a great deal of time ‘communicating’ through the Daily Post and at various government meetings, I will note that the Daily Post has received regular press releases from San Juan Basin Public Health, which we’ve shared with our readers. I might estimate… one press release per week, on average? Maybe 250 press releases over the past five years, on a wide variety of topics? Many of those same press releases have also been shared in the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN.
I think I can count, on one hand, the number of press releases the Daily Post has received from the Archuleta County government during the past five years, in spite of its $30 million budget and staff of 150 people. If we’re looking for a local agency that fails to communicate effectively with its constituents, we don’t have to look very far.
Can our communication, as a total community, improve… and will that help us meet critical needs?
Ms. Bruss referenced the fact that certain health services previously provided by SJBPH are now being delivered by Pagosa Springs Medical Center, Axis Health. and other local providers, while SJBPH has found itself serving as more of a ‘referral service’:
“So we do have people in the community, potentially, that — although these [health services] are available through other organizations in the community — because perhaps they don’t know about those services, and perhaps it’s possible that the out of pocket expenses are high, they may not even go to access those resources…
“On the ground, at the community level, I think the people are potentially not able to access resources, because of the cost associated with it, especially in a county where people are lacking the opportunities to be able to… to have funds. So I think those are real concerns for our community members, and I think those are deeper questions whether this [committee] needs to think about, or whether the community needs to think about.
“We had our fifth [commission] meeting last night and I hear Leslie asking the same question asked over and over. ‘Where are the on-the-ground services for our community members?’ Who is responsible for that? I understand all the big, global stuff. But I think, at the end of the day, people… Leslie’s asking the question. How do we meet people’s needs, without being just a resource and referral service… with documents online…?”
Ms. Bruss then noticed an uncomfortable look on the face of the person sitting next to her — Karin Daniels, Archuleta County’s public representative on the Board of Health for the past 10 years, where she now serves as Vice President.
“You have something to say, Karin?” Ms. Bruss asked, with a friendly smile.
Ms. Daniels did indeed have something to say.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.