Scotland Co. Commissioners vote to consolidate Health Department and DSS

LAURINBURG — In a 4-3 vote, the Scotland County Board of Commissioners decided to consolidate the county’s Department of Social Services and Health Department into a human services agency during their regular business meeting on Monday.

The act came after Commissioner Bo Frizzell’s third attempt at the motion. He first moved to consolidate the departments. Frizzell then amended the motion to also include making the County Board of Commissioners the governing board over the newly unified department. With this model, the two existing governing boards would become advisory boards with county commissioners making final governing decisions.

Although seconding Frizzell’s initial motion, Commissioner Ed O’Neal was hesitant to decide on the governing model.

“I think that’s a separate discussion,” O’Neal said.

The motion was withdrawn, and a new motion was made to consolidate the two departments with an effective date of Nov. 1. Commissioners will at a later date, determine the governing model of the new department.

Commissioners O’Neal, Frizzell, Tim Ivey and Jeff Shelley all voted in favor of the consolidation. Commissioners Darwin Williams, Clarence McPhatter and Tanya Edge voted against the consolidation.

The vote came following a public hearing where Andy Kurtzman, vice chair of the DSS Board, spoke on behalf of employees within the department. Kurtzman posed a list of questions to commissioners that included what would be specific changes and how will these changes affect employees, will posisitions be effected by the consolidation, what is the point and reason of consolidation, what improvements or effiencies are expected as a result of the consolidation and how would the consolidation be managed to optimize minimal disruption to services?

“This sort of came up as a surprise to me,” Kurtzman said. “Why was it being considered in the first place? What do you see is the benefits? What are the cons of doing it? Will it be efficiency? Is it going to create weaknesses, changes for the employees?”

Speaking on behalf of the Health Department Board was the board’s chair, Ian Yancey.

“I come today really emploring you as our county commissioners to thoroughly review and turn over and look under the rocks, all the corks that may come with change,” Yancy said.

Yancy said discussions of consolidation have caused a “lot of uneasiness” within the Health Department.

“I don’t think I can completely speak for DSS, but I think there’s some reluctance on the employees’ behalf to speak and ask questions in fear of retaliation if there was questions posed or strong opinions shared, and I can’t fault them for that,” Yancy said.

Commissioner Ivey said that he believes there would be minimal effect on employees.

County Manager April Snead said information was given out to staff in regards to consolidation.

“What that was was … our personnel department took the state Human Resources Act and compared it to our Scotland County Personnel Policy to see how they mirror, to see how there is very, very little change from what we already practice … That was shared with staff a least two weeks ago,” Snead said.

Snead said that she ultimately posed the option of consolidation to commissioners when viewing each department within the county and considering ways to make them more efficient and consistent.

“This was about doing with these two departments what we’ve done with the rest of the county … It’s about consistency in governance,” Snead said. “It’s about consistency with our personnel policies, consistency in staff being under personnel policies. So those were the reasons presented to commissioners as a reason you could consider this if that’s something you wanted to do.”

Before the vote, Snead told commissioners there’s no right or wrong answer to this.

“Do you want to have a more governing approach to DSS and Health? That’s up to you,” Snead said. “There’s no right or there’s no wrong to that. It’s just up to you … How consistent do you want to be as a county or do you want to continue as we are ..? It’s an option and I would not be doing my duty as we review our departments not to tell you what your options are.”

Commissioner Williams, who also serves on the DSS Board, said that he feels the county is being too hasty in deciding on consolidation.

“The major concern is why now and why do we need to do it? They (employees) just want a simple answer of why we justify consolidation, and I don’t think we’ve given them that, or they don’t feel we’re giving them the reason why we should do it and why we should do it now,” Williams said.

Commissioner O’Neal, who serves on the Health Board, said that consolidation would be an integration of services.

“A lot of the clients who go to DSS also are serviced by the Health Department,” O’Neal said. “I think there’s opportunities to integrate those services and make it seamless. I think sometimes it’s treated as two separate things when there’s an opportunity to work together for the benefit of the client and I think it’s easy to lose the client and start thinking we’re DSS, this is what we need. We’re Health Department, this is what we need.”