GREENFIELD — With city councilors seemingly working with different facts about the state of the Health Department’s budget, councilors Isaac Mass and Brickett Allis took aim at the mayor for why there’s no clear answer on how to fund the city’s depleted inspection departments.
“You’re being fed a bunch of hooey,” Mass said at a Tuesday night council meeting where supplemental funding for the inspections departments was being sought.
The “hooey” was about whether the Health Department truly needed more money to pay for an additional health inspector. The mayor’s office was seeking a total $42,800 between the heath and building departments.
The debate led to the council deciding not to give the money for additional health and building inspectors for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30.
The inspection departments, by the end of the night, were left without a plan on how to run their departments for the next six months.
Councilors Tim Dolan and Otis Wheeler were absent from the night’s meeting, eroding the typical progressive majority on the council.
The plans for what the council was going to do about providing for additional inspectors changed Tuesday night because the outgoing health inspector recently decided to come back for a part-time position, instead of leaving the decimated department with zero inspectors.
The initial request that came to the council was for $50,000 for the health department and $22,800 for the building department. The health department supplemental request was reduced from $50,000 to $20,000 to fund a full-time health inspector for the remainder of the fiscal year, until June. This would beef up the health department from one half-timer to 1½ inspectors.
“We do not have enough money in the budget, currently for the health department, to hire a full time health inspector,” said Mark Smith, acting as mayor for William Martin while he is out following a death in the family said.
Earlier in the evening, at a Ways and Means Committee meeting, Smith said, he took responsibility for the situation — including the decimation of the department that had to fire its previous director and saw three inspectors resign in six months.
“While I have responsibility, I will ensure those missteps stop,” Smith said. “I will own that.”
Councilor Brickett Allis cautioned he was not ready to vote on funding the inspections positions because he wasn’t intimate enough with the city’s budget yet.
“I’m really having a hard time wrapping my mind around all of the numbers,” Allis said at a Ways and Means Committee meeting earlier in the evening, based on conflicting knowledge of the budget based on emails with the outgoing, interim finance director and on the information he received for the meeting.
During the City Council meeting, Allis and Councilor Isaac Mass spent a significant amount of time questioning the new finance director and the city’s treasurer about the budget.
The confusion over how much money the health department has spent and why there isn’t more money left for the health department remained unanswered for Allis and Mass.
Allis also debated the need for a public health nurse, based on his current knowledge of the what he sees as the position doing. He said it’s possibly a redundant service.
“It might be important for us to shift our focus if that is the case,” Allis said.
The $50,000 request comes from the roughly $53,000 the council cut under the direction of then-President Allis and Vice President Mass.
A May document from the City Council explained the two councilor’s reason for cutting the health department’s budget: “The department was so underworked that they focused on picayune and self-serving/generated complaints including but not limited to bringing court action related to the length of grass of one of the inspector’s immediate neighbors.”
At last month’s City Council meeting, the Board of Health chairman implored the council to reinstate the money it had cut from the health department’s budget. He explained over the past year, the department had “collapsed.”
The chairman, Steve Adam, made his remarks to the council on the heels of news that the Health Department was two weeks away from having zero inspectors left on staff after its final remaining member resigned.
The last inspector had decided to leave the decimated department because the workload was greater than she ever expected. Chelsey Little, who had been working in another department in Greenfield before becoming a health inspector, was in school to receive a degree in the field. She said she left without taking another job.
In a memo Mark Snow sent to Mayor Martin in June, the city’s lead building inspector outlined over six pages what has happened because of the cuts to his department.
“It’s unfortunate that a department this size like the Inspection Department that generates so much revenue for the city continues to have its budget cut,” Snow said.
He said it’s not possible to get the work done with a single inspector.
“Work not done by this department not only jeopardizes public safety, it will affect the general conditions of buildings, and have a negative effect for the economic growth of Greenfield,” Snow said in the June memo.
In lieu of city inspectors, the mayor and interim-Finance Director Lane Kelly had proposed working with the Franklin Regional Council of Governments to provide inspection help for $150,000 over three years.
The cost would have been similar to the price of an in-house inspector, Kelly said. Under this original plan the hired health inspector would cover work on food establishments, it would leave a host of work still unaccounted for in the department.
Now, the request has changed, scrapping the FRCOG plan, but leaving further questions not only for the next six months in the fiscal year but for the years to come.