photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

The Douglas County Courthouse is pictured Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022.

When Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health hands off family-planning services to another provider at the end of June, it seems that that provider won’t be moving those services very far — or moving them at all.

Heartland Community Health Center, which will be applying for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s grant for family-planning service providers, is planning to add a service site at the Community Health Building at 200 Maine St., the home of the health department’s current clinic.

That’s according to materials included with the agenda for this Wednesday’s Douglas County Commission meeting, at which commissioners will hear an update about the impending transition for family-planning — or Title X — services in Douglas County from the health department’s director, Dan Partridge, and Heartland CEO Julie Branstrom. A timeline in the agenda materials shows that Heartland plans to add the Community Health Building service site once the health department discontinues its Title X services after June 30.

Title X services include contraceptive services, pregnancy testing, screenings for breast and cervical cancer and sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment.

Heartland hasn’t yet submitted its grant application, according to the timeline. That will be submitted by March 15, and the clinic will then work to increase its staffing capacity as the program rolls out at the start of July and incorporate walk-in availability at the same time.

This will be the second time this year that commissioners have heard from Partridge about the shift. As the Journal-World reported, county leaders had plenty of questions for Partridge in January about how the transition would work, and this week’s presentation is intended to address some of them.

That will include data about clinic wait times during 2022, which relates to commissioners’ concerns about folks having access to same-day services, and clinic encounter trends from 2019 to 2022. Partridge’s presentation also includes the results of some recent focus groups that asked participants why they chose to get Title X services through the health department clinic; that addresses the commission’s request for an answer to that question, but the health department’s board learned last week that only about a dozen people participated in that exercise due to inclement weather on the same day.

The commission also wanted to know more about employee morale, after a number of former health department clinic nurses told the Journal-World they were so upset about the decision to pass Title X services off to another provider that they decided to quit. The agenda also includes an employee survey conducted in January — well after all of the six or so former employees who spoke to the Journal-World had already quit.

One thing the presentation this week won’t cover is how many of the health department’s clients are undocumented immigrants. That’s a demographic that Commissioner Shannon Reid said she was especially concerned about in January; she said many of them already are familiar with the health department as a place they can go to receive Title X services for free.

But Partridge said that the department had decided not to ask clients about their immigration status. In a memo to County Administrator Sarah Plinsky included in the agenda packet, he wrote that “to do so could potentially cause some clients to avoid seeking our services which runs counter to our mission and vision of health equity.”

Upon taking over Title X services, Heartland plans to offer the same discount that patients receive at the health department for Title X care, according to the clinic, plus access to sliding-scale fees for all of its other services.

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The commission will also consider a conditional use permit request for a landfill at 631 North 950 Road, just south of Clinton Lake.

That property is owned by Hamm Quarry, which operates a few quarry sites around the county. The 631 N. 950 Road site hasn’t been quarried since 2013, and members of the Lawrence-Douglas County Metropolitan Planning Commission determined the site hasn’t been used for anything but storage since then when they discussed the permit application at their meeting on Jan. 23. The landfill permit would provide additional fill to aid in reclamation.

The planning commission forwarded a unanimous recommendation to deny the permit, which county commissioners will consider at Wednesday’s meeting. In part, that’s because county planner Mary Miller confirmed that the quarry permit, which was approved with no time limit in 1975, has no conditions or deadlines for operation.

“So what we’ve been doing for quite a long time is building safety valves into CUPs, so if nothing happens, we’ve got five-year reviews, we have sunsets, and then you have to get a new CUP,” Planning Commissioner Jim Carpenter said at the January planning commission meeting. “But we’re being held hostage here by a 1975 CUP that had no protections in it.”

Planning commissioners in January also expressed concerns about environmental impact and other technical issues related to the application.

In other business, the commission will:

• During a work session, hear a presentation from the county’s director of zoning, Tonya Voigt, about the possible approval of additional residential building permits on certain private roads.

Privately maintained roads provide access to several hundred residential properties in the county, according to the agenda item report for the work session, and commissioners individually approved private roads for residential use from 1972 to 1998. Some existing private roads could potentially provide access to vacant parcels that weren’t included in an original approval, which the county’s Zoning and Codes Department has reviewed and plans to share with the commission this week for the group to consider for potential access approval at a future meeting.

• Consider a request to rezone 37.2 acres at 2384 North 200 Road, which is located just over the southeastern Douglas County line off of U.S. Highway 56, west of Edgerton. The property owner wants to divide it into three parcels, which would require rezoning to a “Transitional Agricultural” district.

• Consider approving East 773 Road, located east of Lecompton, as a private road serving three residential parcels. A property owner wants to access the road to build another residence.

Wednesday’s work session will begin at 4 p.m., followed by the business meeting at 5:30 p.m. at the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St. The meeting will also be available by Zoom. For meeting information, visit the county’s website: dgcoks.org/commissionmeetings.