Budget crisis threatens Health District

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 11:25 a.m.

Clark County Health District officials say they'll turn off the poison control hotline and cut back restaurant inspections unless the state pledges to fund the programs.

If proposed state budget cuts occur, health officials said they will shut down the hotline June 30 and make fewer and less frequent inspections of the more than 12,000 restaurants in Clark County.

Restaurants are supposed to be inspected at least once a year to try to insure that the customers don't get food poisoning. The health district has about 40 inspectors to make those rounds.

"If we do not have the staff, the potential for bad players to sneak through the system and put people jeopardy," Dr. Donald Kwalick, chief health officer for the Health District, said today.

Kwalick said inspectors will concentrate on the "high-risk restaurants," those that have had a history of poor inspections and downgrades from A to C grades.

"We will keep on top of them, but that will be difficult as we also will be cutting back on overtime and comp time," Kwalick said.

He said he was most concerned about the poison control hotline closure, however, because the hotline receives about 25,000 calls a year and many of those calls are emergencies. Without the hotline many people, particularly children, could be left in "big danger," he said.

The district will scramble to try to find alternative funding for the service, perhaps from hospitals or the 911 district, Kwalick said.

He was to informing other state and county health officials about the looming cutbacks at todays health board meeting in Las Vegas.

"We are going to look at all of our programs, and if we are doing any state programs that we are not being funded to do, then we no longer will be doing them because we don't have the money," Kwalick said just before the meeting. "We will not be doing their job."

Kwalick said the scaling back of services will be necessary if proposed state budget cuts are approved. Thursday, the Nevada Senate and Assembly budget committees discussed eliminating $1.3 million of $1.7 million the county gets from the state.

If the budget cuts are made that would mean the state's general fund money would account for just 1 percent of the county Health District's budget, health officials said. That would provide about $400,000 for tuberculosis testing and programs, said Karl Munninger, the district's director of administrative services, who testified Thursday.

The Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center of Denver, which runs the local poison control hotline locally, agreed last year to accept $175,000 to operate the program in Southern Nevada, Kwalick said. This year's bill, however, is projected to be $320,000.

Kwalick said it was absurd to be cutting health budgets after terrorist attacks and the anthrax and smallpox scares had shown how ill prepared health districts were to handle larger scale emergencies.

Kwalick also said that on average, local health districts get 23 percent of their funding from the state. Currently, the Health District gets 5 percent of its funding from the state.

"This is the tightest budget in the history of the health district," Kwalick said.

Currently the district has 63 vacancies which represents 13 percent of its work force, Munninger testified Thursday.

Munninger said one of the five neighborhood health centers also may have to be closed because of a lack of state funding.

County health officials are concerned that by cutting the funding during a tough time, it will leave the health budgets further behind for future funding. Michael Hillerby, deputy chief of staff for Guinn, said, "all of us face difficult budget choices."

He said if the Legislature can find sources of revenue, the administration will support that.

He said the state health divisions through its programs and grants already spend $60 million a year in Clark County.