Washington Co. Public Health will not hire interim director

WASHINGTON — Members of the Washington County Board of Health opted not to hire an interim administrator for the county’s public health agency on Friday, where Director Emily Tokheim will depart after Feb. 29 for a new job at Iowa Health and Human Services.

In 2021, the agency hired Jefferson County’s Chris Estle part-time as Interim Public Health Administrator to fill the roughly three-month gap between previous Director Danielle Pettit-Majewski’s departure and Tokheim’s hire.

On this go-round, however, the Board of Health has opted to instead delegate the director’s duties among internal staff, a recommendation Tokheim pitched at the meeting formally announcing her resignation last week.

“I’ve had a couple of conversations internally with some of the staff that may be taking on some additional duties,” she said. “They think that would be agreeable, given the circumstances and given the uncertainty of the timing.”

Tokheim said her responsibilities would be divided into “buckets,” with different staff handling different areas until the next agency executive’s arrival. Those areas include “program compliance,” “home care and nurse staffing,” “fiscal and operational assurances,” “client complaints and signatory authority,” and “executive oversight.“

Those duties will be split up between the agency’s fiscal administrator, director of nursing, assistant director of nursing, and the board of health as a whole in the interim, according to Tokheim.

The outgoing director said public health staff had tested the approach during her maternity leave last year, and encountered few issues doing so. While staff won’t have their usual director available by phone for quick decisions or occasional check-ins like they did in 2023, Tokheim said the agency could step up communication with the board of health to ensure executive decisions weren’t left in limbo.

“We’ve had a trial run, and of course the delegation of duties comes with a lot of how-tos, that I’ve already been working on and preparing,” she said. “I think it makes it manageable to not dump everything onto one person, to make it manageable and flexible.”

A posting for the soon-to-open public health director’s position will stay up at least until the end of the day on March 1, according to board of health members, with a possible extension after that depending on application volume. Board members said they anticipated a timeline of months, not weeks, to account for application time, job interviews, and candidate consideration.

The position will post with a salary of $75-95,000 a year, depending on applicants’ experience. That’s a bit higher than the $70-90,000 range posted ahead of Tokheim’s hire, but Board of Health member and County Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. said it was important to account for inflation.

“In an extraordinary circumstance, I don’t think that there’d be any lack of support from the Board of Supervisors if we were to do a budget amendment, or do some real significant change,” he said. “It just all depends on the circumstances.”

Tokheim has said her decision to take a state-level position was a personal one, and that she had no bad blood with Washington County as she plans to leave the role.

“I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and gratitude for my time serving Washington County in this capacity,” she said in her resignation letter last week. “I am incredibly proud of the work we have been able to accomplish in a short amount of time and I look forward to continuing to partner with this agency in my new role with HHS. This was a difficult decision to make, but I could not pass up the opportunity to relocate closer to family.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com