Commissioner Lacey Cruse proposes turning health board duties over to medical experts
As the Sedgwick County Commission struggles with the coronavirus pandemic, Commissioner Lacey Cruse is proposing that it give up its role as the Board of Health and turn those duties over to medical professionals.
Cruse launched that proposal on her Facebook page Thursday.
“The Board of Health should be an actual separate body from the Board of County Commissioners,” she wrote. “Not a single one of us has a medical degree or history of making medical decisions for an entire community of people.”
The commission has served as the Health Board since 2002. Before that, Wichita and Sedgwick County had separate public health departments overseen by a joint city-county board primarily made up of health professionals.
The proposal followed a tense commission meeting Wednesday where Cruse was on the short end of a 4-1 vote to encourage Gov. Laura Kelly and county Health Officer Garold Minns to put a quick end to coronavirus control orders, with an eye toward letting businesses make most of their own decisions on how to reopen the economy.
“My vote was based on the motion that would strip the authority of the only medical professional we have (Minns) to make medical decisions,” Cruse wrote in her post. “Public Health decisions should be made by Public Health officials. Not politicians with no medical degree.
“Yesterday, it was clear that a few commissioners think they know more than medical and health professionals who have been entrenched in science and medicine their entire careers. I take a different approach. It’s called listening.”
Cruse closed out her post with a recommendation to reopen the county for commerce, “but do it with a plan.”
“Our current plan: Wash your hands. Cover your mouth. Keep your distance. Good luck,” she wrote.
Commissioner David Dennis said Cruse’s proposal would take “our eye off the ball of what we’re really trying to do. This is a discussion for after COVID. We’ve got to get through that. It just distracts our staff from doing their work if they have to start researching this.”
Cruse said she’s not asking for an immediate change, just that the commission and the community start thinking about it.
She said she floated her plan on Facebook without passing it by other commissioners because they don’t listen to her anyway.
“If commissioners can’t answer questions and speak to me in a public meeting, what’s to make me think they’ll speak to me behind closed doors?” she said. “They don’t speak to me behind closed doors either.”
The fissure was on display Wednesday in an exchange between Cruse and Dennis over whether to start a second COVID-19 test site on East Ninth Street.
Dennis said he thinks the current test site on Central is sufficient to meet testing needs and if the Health Department starts another one, he wants similar treatment for outlying communities such as Cheney.
When Cruse pressed Dennis over whether those communities actually need test sites, it led to a testy exchange:
Dennis: Have they considered the rest of the county?
Cruse: Have you brought it up before today? I mean, I’ve been talking about this for three weeks.
Dennis: Are we going to get into an argument back and forth? We don’t do that in this commission.
Cruse: Well, I just I feel like you’re being sort of . . .
Dennis: We don’t argue back and forth from the bench.
When Commission Chairman Pete Meitzner stepped in to end the exchange and recognized Commissioner Jim Howell, Cruse remarked: “Well, thank you for telling me what I can do. I appreciate that.”
On Thursday, Cruse said “David Dennis didn’t like my question, so he shut me down. He raised his voice and he shut me down. I wasn’t arguing, I was raising questions that he didn’t want to answer.”
Dennis said part of the problem is that to maintain social distancing, the commission has moved away from its usual bench and now sits face-to-face around tables arranged in a square.
“I think it’s the way that this meeting is now being run doesn’t allow us to run the business the way we used to,” Dennis said. “I’m not saying what we used to do was 100 percent perfect, but at least we always acknowledged the commissioner and if we disagreed with them, we turned on our light and then when it came our turn, then we could express our opinion.
“It wasn’t where it’s hey, if I don’t agree with you, I’m going to break in and start attacking immediately.”
Contributing: Chance Swaim of The Eagle
