Meeting makes little progress on health department wage request

Hill County Commissioner Jake Strissel met with members of the Hill County Health Department Tuesday to discuss possible ways to raise their wages to a level reflecting their educational requirements, something the department has been asking for for years with little success.

Health department employees have advocated for a raise in wages across the county in general, but say their department is in particular need, because their jobs require degrees and ongoing education which is very expensive.

Employees of the department have expressed serious concerns that these wages, already low compared to other counties, combined with an increasingly strained relationship between the department and county leadership, will lead to resignations, increased burnout and a dearth of applicants for open positions.

One employee, WIC Coordinator Nicole Hungerford, has resigned from the county department to take a position with the state.

During Tuesday's meeting, Hill County Public Health Director Kim Berg said the average public health nurse in Montana starts at around $28 per hour, while Hill County starts at $21.

Berg said Hill County Lead Public Health Nurse Bridget Kallenberger, who's been with the department for 19 years, makes $23-and-change an hour. She said the average wage for a public health officer in Montana is over $40 and hour, and after 13 years on the job, she is at $26, and that's not right.

Hungerford, who's been with the department for nearly nine years, announced her resignation from the department last week, citing wages and the commission's treatment of the department as the primary reasons for her departure, leaving the department with less than half the staff it had in 2017.

"We're not even getting applications," Berg said.

During the meeting Tuesday, which Commissioner Sheri Williams didn't attend due to illness, and Commissioner Mark Peterson didn't due to a doctor's appointment, Strissel said he was there representing himself as a commissioner, not the commission itself.

He said the matter of addressing wages is long-overdue and he wants to get the department to "where it should be," saying the current state of affairs is not right.

He said the strained relationship between the department and the commission predates his time as a commissioner, but he admitted that he could do a better job of visiting with the department and hearing their concerns.

Strissel has been a Hill County Commissioner for more that two years.

While Tuesday's meeting was originally billed as an opportunity for the commission to present its plan for raising the department's wages, it was mostly an opportunity for members of the health department to provide ideas for how to do that, ideas that had largely already been provided to the commission in previous meetings.

At a meeting of the Hill County Board of Health Feb. 1, when the matter of wages came up, Commissioner Peterson said they would come to the department with a plan to raise wages within a week, though he expanded that timeline to 10 days later in the meeting.

During Tuesday's meeting department employees expressed frustration that after four weeks of waiting there is still no plan.

Strissel said the commission was initially considering holding a special election to ask county residents to consent to a tax increase to pay for the wages, but the commission decided that was inappropriate given the strained economic environment the people of Hill County face.

"Hey, we know you can't buy a dozen eggs but we're gonna raise your (taxes)," he said.

At a meeting of the Hill County Commission early last month, Peterson announced their intent to possibly hold the election, but county officials, who all agreed that the increase was necessary, pointed out that holding it outside of a typical election year would cost the county $30,000 and force them to work within an incredibly tight timeline, which would give the public the impression that the matter was being rushed, only hurting its chances of passing.

After briefly discussing Tuesday the matter of a special election, Strissel went through a few other possibilities they had concluded were infeasible and said he was "wracking his brain" to come up with a solution, lamenting that Havre is too big to qualify for a lot of low-income grants, but too small to have a tax-base to support the wages employees want.

Over the next hour health department employees, including Berg, provided him a list of possible solutions, almost all of which had been suggested in previous meetings.

Berg said the commission could hire a third party consultant to examine the county to find inefficiencies that could be eliminated so they would have enough to increase pay for the health department, or, indeed, all county employees, not just the health department, something that has been suggested to the commission multiple times in the past few years.

Employees have said the county could make efforts to modify its operations, moving to electronic storage for documents, which would save time and money.

Berg said the department, assuming the sanitarian position remains separate, only needs less that $30,000 to fix the problem, pointing out that a currently-unfilled secretary position at the Unified Disposal Board is funded at $30,000.

Health department employees said that by eliminating that one position, the duties of which they said seem to be being handled adequately by another position, would free up enough money to solve the problem and then some, so going to the public for a tax increase seems unnecessary given the relatively small scope of the money they're discussing.

There was some confusion during the meeting over exactly how that position is funded and if that would actually work, but Berg and others said the point they are making is that the money they're asking for is something they think could be worked out without necessarily going to the taxpayer.

Strissel said he's on the Montana Association of Counties Health and Human Services Committee and he learned about a new grant program that may be helpful at their last meeting.

He said he only just received information on it so he needs to look further into it but it's a possibility.

He also asked if they can restructure with the budget they have, but Berg said too many positions have already been combined and burnout is already a problem they're facing, so that doesn't really seem like a viable solution.

Strissel said he wants to have a plan to fix this problem done before the next fiscal year, but he doesn't see any way to solve the problem at this time.

"I just don't know a solution at this juncture," he said.

He suggested they set up another meeting in two weeks, which Berg agreed to, but said that meeting needs to produce something to be worth it.

"Something has to come out of it," she said.

Strissel agreed, saying, "I don't like to have meetings just to have meetings."

Before the meeting ended, employees again expressed the urgency of the situation, with Berg saying that, despite everything that has happened, everyone in that room had stayed with the county through the pandemic, which is not something every health department can say, and their work and dedication deserves proper compensation.

Strissel agreed and said he would try to make a point of visiting with the health department more often.

Health department nurse Susan Somers said that is appreciated, but unless there is substantive action on the concerns the department has brought to the commission, there's only so far that gesture will go.

"That means something and it doesn't," she said.