After Tuesday’s decision, city of Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo said the future looks bright for the city's health department, and it looks forward to serving the residents in a more efficient way.
Guajardo says city manager Peter Zanoni brought the idea of a city-run health department to city council, which unanimously voted in favor of the proposal. It would mean severing from the current Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District.
"We already have a health entity,” she said. “We have one, so we are not raising taxes, we are not creating fees. This is monies that are already being allocated.”
Zanoni said the system by which the Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District is run is outdated, and that every other major city in Texas has its own health department.
He said this is a much more efficient way to serve city residents.
“The community wants better health outcomes,” he said. “We want a better business model to be able to provide better health outcomes to our community, and we want our employees to feel better about what they do."
Wednesday morning Zanoni was at the city-county health center on Horne Road speaking to employees about the upcoming split.
“We need all of them to help us in the transition period so that the new city department that comes onboard on January 19 is highly functional already from the get-go," he said.
Zanoni said work on the new department has already begun.
“We are going to first determine: What programs do we want to continue? We may want to even start new programming. And then what type of positions do we need, and then we are gonna have persons apply for those positions across the organization."
