By Mary Faulds
CCN Correspondent

GALION — Galion’s City Health Department was the subject of a hot debate during Tuesday night’s council meeting.

Health department board member Andee Wildenthaler addressed council near the end of its meeting with a spreadsheet proposal for cuts to the department’s budget.

In December, Belinda Miller from the State Auditor’s Office, suggested that the city completely cut its health department and contract services with the Crawford County Health Department to help cover the $600,000 needed to be cut from the city’s budget during the next five years and release it from fiscal emergency.

Wildenthaler said the city has a magic number of $259,000 that the health department needs to operate under. The budget suggested some cuts of approximately $50,000, to which Mayor Tom O’Leary expressed skepticism.

He said some of the cuts weren’t realistic and the cuts or freezes in pay would actually be detrimental to the health department. Wildenthaler responded by saying the board was open and willing to consider any suggestions from the council.

O’Leary continued, questioning how much savings would there actually be considering the money the city would have to pay the county to contract the same level of service and whether the county would need additional staff to handle the larger workload. He said currently this is not a merger and there are not any current plans to dissolve the city’s health department.

O’Leary then moved to his frustration with the entire process of emerging from fiscal emergency.

“Some of us feel like the markers have always been changed on fiscal emergency,” he said.

He compared it to a shell game and said the city can’t seem to find the peanut under the shell. He said new requirements keep coming down at the last minute from the State Auditor and the health department cut seems to be one of those last-minute things, because Galion hadn’t heard anything about the department until the city did their budget presentation in December.

He called the move a lot of nonsense that unfairly put a lot of pressure on council to eliminate something that has been around a long time.

The city council expressed their support of the health department and their willingness to work to find a solution that will keep it in existence.