The elephant in the room on Wednesday's Nueces County Commissioners' Court meeting was the agenda item addressing the Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District split.
But before commissioners even made that far down the list, they found themselves stumbling on a question about paying potential new public-health district personnel.
READ MORE: County to ask city for more time in health district split
During the court's Sept. 8 meeting, it approved a grant which would allow the public-health district's lab to absorb 16 positions which currently are state-funded jobs. The grant would allow the county to take over paying the positions.
The issue came up again Wednesday because of what assistant public-health director Luis Wilmot chalked up to an oversight: The original meeting's agenda item failed to note exactly which positions would be covered by the grant.
A missed detail as seemingly insignificant as that, though, sometimes means the difference between being awarded money or being denied.
"All he forgot to do was name the positions," Judge Barbara Canales said to commissioner Joe A. Gonzalez, who suggested postponing its discussion. "What was overlooked was the verbiage the last time it came to court on Sept. 8. It — the grant is solid. It's already been accepted by the court. All we need to do is clarify the the grant's use is for these positions."
Without the grant, lab and grant administrator Denzel Acuna said the state-funded members of the lab's data-entry staff could be defunded on Jan. 31, 2022, and contact-tracing staff could lose their jobs Nov. 30.
"So if we do not approve this for these folks, the work stops for them," Wilmot said. "Their contact tracing, their epidemiology and disease surveillance that they're conducting right now — that stops when the expiration stops."
But the discussion worried Gonzalez, Brent Chesney and Robert Hernandez because of the city of Corpus Christi's intent to dissolve its agreement to jointly run the local public-health district with the county.
"And so what happens if, depending on what happens with all this health-district stuff, we somehow have to unwind all this?" Chesney asked. "That's what I'm just confused on."
It was a point Canales said was moot, since the grant ultimately belongs to the public-health district itself. The county is just the group entrusted with it.
"There's many, many grants," she said. "But remember: All these grants go to the health district. The fact that the county is a fiduciary, or the city is a fiduciary, is really just — it's a matter of duty."
Wilmot said that, while the grant is COVID-19-related, the epidemiology — the study of how disease spreads — extends to all infectious diseases found in the area such as a recent case of tuberculosis, West Nile encephalitis, and a tickborne illness called tularemia. The at-risk positions are the ones charged with reporting and verifying these local infections.
"This grant has already been approved," Canales said. "What we're trying to do is keep people in their jobs and keep this lab running and open. That's the only thing we're doing today. It doesn't change all of the headaches that we have going forward with unraveling everything. Don't stop this lab from running."
