Chautauqua County Legislature meeting – March 23, 2022

A resolution regarding a Wastewater Surveillance Pilot Program passed 16 to 2 in the Chautauqua County Legislature Wednesday night.

Legislator and County Board of Health member Liz Rankin said the program is not mandated and the county had originally planned to use American Rescue Plan monies to fund doing it before the grant was received. She said the grant had already been accepted with the resolution on the agenda adopting a budget for the grant.

Rankin said she was voting yes not just to fulfill the grant obligations but also because she believed in what the grant supports, “The wastewater surveillance program is an early warning system for managing COVID and to give a community profile, give us a heads up, not to isolate and quarantine people, but to mobilize staff and resources, first responders, and long term care systems. Public health surveillance has been around for a very long time.”

Rankin added wastewater surveillance has been done for decades including being used in the 1940s for polio, in the 1980s for Hepatitis A virus and norovirus outbreaks, and in the 1990s as well, “We are not creating something new. We are folding in a technology that’s going to work for us now. This is a great opportunity for us to stay on top of public health trends. The samples are collected at publicly owned central treatment plants and not in neighborhoods and not at specific houses. We’re not targeting anyone in particular. It is planning for the community based on results.”

An amendment proposed by Legislator Tom Harmon added language that would limit the collection of wastewater samples to publicly owned wastewater treatment plants. The amendment also stated a spreadsheet report on the collections would be provided after the pilot program ended on July 31, 2022.

Legislators John Davis and Bob Scudder were the two no votes.

The legislature unanimously approved a $2 million grant from the State Department of Health to hire fellows to work with the County Health Department.

Legislature Chairman Pierre Chagnon said he spoke with an epidemiologist who lives in his district who worked on the creation of the fellowship program. He said the program was established six months into the pandemic when state and local counties realized they didn’t have enough health care workers to deal with the pandemic effectively, “So the concept was, how do we get more people involved in public health, trained in public health, educated in public health. So this was created as a means of encouraging people to become more educated in public health by putting them to work in fellowships working with public health departments in the counties, doing work on the ground, learning about public health.”

Chagnon said under the program, fellows will be employed by not-for-profit organizations and work for and at the direction of the County Health Department, “Not at the direction of the state at all. So, they’re there to help the county health department, public health department. And they’re there to learn and experience the public health field first hand so that they can become better educated about the practice of public health and also to encourage those who are interested in pursuing education in public health.”

Chagnon emphasized the concerns he’s heard about the fellows working for the state are misinformed.

The legislature also passed a resolution accepting a a $25,000 grant for the Chautauqua County Mental Hygiene Department‘s Mobile Crisis Unit. The grant is to be used for education and training; billing, equipment and electronic medical record expenses.

Chautauqua County Legislature’s Human Services Committee

The County Legislature’s Human Services Committee approved a $2 million grant to hire fellows to work with the County Health Department.

Department of Health and Human Services Director Christine Schuyler said the two-year grant is through the State Department of Health Public Health Corps Fellowship Program, “This was a brainchild of the State Health Department during the Pandemic. In an effort to increase the public health workforce, this program was devised and every county in the state was allocated a certain amount of funding in order to either employ, or contract with, or some how bring these fellows on board.”

Schuyler said the county would use a local non-profit agency to hire the fellows. She said the grant funding received allows hiring up to 13 fellows, but the county will likely only use four.

Schuyler said the fellows are those working toward degrees or have degrees to eventually become employed in public health. She said the state guidelines allow the fellows to work in a variety of ways, “So for instance, we could have a fellow placed at the federally qualified health center to assist them with COVID work. We are also in the process of our community health assessment, which is a requirement of the state and a fellow could assist us with that process from the outside, and also with our accreditation of our local health department which is something we’ve been wanting to do and we now could have extra resources through this state funded program to help make that happen.”

Schuyler said this program would hopefully bring in more people to work in public health. She said the Health Department has experienced a 20% cut in workforce in the last 10 years and given that it’s an aging workforce, employees also will be retiring soon.