PHOTO: Advisory Committee candidate Mozhdeh Bruss at her February 7, 2023, interview with the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners.
As I noted in Part One, I listened to four of the nine interviews conducted by the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners last week, as part of their process for choosing the volunteers to serve on the new ‘Transitional Health Department Advisory Committee’. And as noted, I was impressed with the interesting range of backgrounds and experiences the candidates brought to the interviews.
The Advisory Committee met yesterday morning with the Board of County Commissioners, to get their marching orders. I did not attend the meeting, so I don’t know exactly what those marching orders might be. But I heard from one of the Committee members, that the word “fun” was probably not the right term to apply to their upcoming work.
As I mentioned yesterday in Part One, I was particularly impressed with the comments and questions offered by Advisory Committee candidate Dr. Mozhdeh Bruss during her February 7 interview with the BOCC. Dr. Bruss was not selected to serve on the seven-person committee, for whatever reasons, but I enjoyed listening to her ‘give and take’ conversation with the commissioners.
She was asked, at the end of her interview, if she had questions for the BOCC.
One of her questions, discussed briefly yesterday, concerned the relationship between the volunteer task force and the “Internal Transitional Health Department Oversight Committee” which is composed of certain members of the County administrative staff.
“I’m not sure exactly what the ‘Internal Oversight Committee’ is going to be doing. How are they going to be interfacing with the Advisory Committee? And how soon are they going to be implementing what’s going to come out of this group? What’s the process by which these two bodies are going to work, in supporting the development of this new agency, for our county?”
Commission chair Ronnie Maez:
“I think as the funding goes along… we’re going to have to establish a fund balance… we do have some funding set aside and earmarked for the setting up the Archuleta County Health Department… so I think, what this committee brings to us for future direction, and the Board of Health… where we’re going to start, what we’re going to implement… whether it’s statutorily required… that should actually show us… give us a timeline, and a financial timeline, of what we can implement into this program.”
Commissioner Maez has a deep love for his community, but I think his answer to Dr. Bruss’ question — which was not really an answer at all, to her actual question — illustrates the essential difficulty facing the Archuleta BOCC. Which is, they’ve never done anything quite like this before, and may have only a vague concept of how to give meaningful direction to a ‘Transitional Health Department Advisory Committee’.
I would be in the same boat, if I were in the commissioners’ position. How does a BOCC, that knows very little about public health, give direction to a volunteer task force… or even more challenging, give direction to a volunteer task force that is also expected to interface, somehow, with an ‘internal oversight committee’ made up of paid staff who have no experience with the delivery of public health services?
Dr. Bruss:
“Do you have a sense of when you are going to start hiring staff? For this new agency? Yesterday?”
County Manager Derek Woodman answered, “Soon.”
Dr. Bruss:
“So, then, that’s an answer to it. So you’re actually…”
Commissioner Warren Brown, interrupting:
“But the staff will be transitional. Because we can only have one board active at a time. So the folks that we bring in, I think the consensus is that we need to hire them yesterday. But they will have a transitional role, and hopefully be able to give us some helpful insight into some of these challenges.”
Dr. Bruss:
“So you will basically have four [decision-making] bodies. The BOCC. The Advisory Committee. The Internal Oversight Committee. And then, the new staff. And the new staff will report to the Internal Oversight body. So I think clarifying some of these roles and relationships, in terms of a timeline, would really be helpful.”
Commissioner Maez:
“Yes, we do have a timeline…”
County Manager Woodman:
“My vision of the Internal Committee is… They have their individual roles as County employees… We have roles and responsibilities. Finance will look more at budgetary aspects. HR will deal with writing job descriptions; we have to come up with, you know, pay grades. So there’s a lot of… I think that’s a lot of what the advisory group will vet. And I firmly believe there’s going to be some requests coming out of the advisory committee, that will fall back to the [staff].”
Dr. Bruss addressed County Manager Woodman:
“So, do you foresee what advice you’re going to be seeking from this advisory group?”
County Manager Woodman:
“How to build a health department.”
Dr. Bruss:
“When these two groups come together, what are going to be their marching orders, over the first month?”
Commissioner Veronica Medina:
“Other than the timeline, there’s other information that we already have, and we can provide that, to help facilitate what that process looks like, going forward. So it’s just not going to be, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ We will be able to provide some documents to help with that.”
Dr. Bruss suggested that the BOCC have a clear ‘ask’ for the advisory committee, “so at the end of their meetings, they have certain deliverables due, in a certain period of time. So it doesn’t become a lot of ‘deliberation’. Because time is of the essence…”
I visited the Archuleta County website this morning, and didn’t see any job listings for new health department staff positions, nor could I find any mention of an ongoing hiring process. So maybe “Soon” doesn’t mean what we assume it to mean…
Or the hiring process is happening ‘under the radar’? I suppose that’s possible.