At the Wednesday night Vanderburgh County Council Meeting, 15 county department vacancies were filled.
These were in the Superior Court, Health Department, Sheriff’s Office and Assesor’s Office.
They also approved what were essentially salary increases for several positions including in the Prosecutor's Office.
The Vanderburgh County Health Department requested the filling of several vacancies such as Onsite Clinic Coordinator and administrative aid.
The only position that required discussion between Administrator Joe Gries and the Council was the approval of another Medical Technologist. The department currently has two full time and one part time staff member.
This person will test health department visitors for various communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and even sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis, which have recently increased in cases according to Gries.
“So the pandemic really saw us kind of take our eyes off of these other communicable diseases,” he said. “And so we're kind of coming back to it now. And we do see an expansion, we had an outbreak of syphilis, we have TB.”
Gries said this will add a third full time tester to the staff to make sure they can test individuals when they arrive and help get them wraparound services if needed.
He said having only 2.5 testers which makes scheduling difficult. “So if anybody takes off or is sick or anything, our clinic shuts down,” he said while discussing the need with the council. “It's hard to find some of these folks. And so when they're there, we've got to be able to provide that test.”
Gries said approximately five come in per day that should be tested for communicable diseases.
This position will cost about $43,000 and Gries is using grant funding for that position this coming year.
Jill Hahn is president of the County Council. She roughly estimates they appropriated more than $200,000 in expenditures and transfers for this particular meeting.
“We want to make sure that what they are doing with the dollar, the taxpayer dollar is definitely going to be beneficial to our local government,” she said, adding that as long as the departments can explain the need for the expense, and the money is available, they’ll approve it.
Hahn said the Council’s job is essentially to be the checkbook for the county departments.
Each department made their case for additional positions to be created, or to transfer funds to support a position or a raise.
Normally such requests are researched and discussed prior to the vote.
Prosecutor Diana Moers’ office requested to elevate an investigator to chief investigator which includes a raise. Her office argued that this integral detective was the lowest paid and had abundant and important experience in the field.
The Sheriff’s Office asked for additional public defender positions to help ease the backlog of cases.
While multiple jobs were created and thousands “spent,” Hahn said this is typical of a County Council meeting. What was unusual was the number of people in the audience. “We had a lot more people in the audience, which was wonderful,” she said. “We really would like to see more participation from the public to be able to see what goes on in the local spending.”
She says there are public budget hearings for the various departments coming up in August if residents want to learn more about how their government functions.
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