photo by: Journal-World

The west side of the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St.

To “reduce the regulatory burden” on its inspectors, the city-county health department wants to exempt itself from having to do annual sanitary inspections at Douglas County’s schools, where it says its work is duplicated by other agencies.

Kansas statute requires local health officers to, “upon the opening of the fall term of school, make a sanitary inspection of each school building and grounds.” But it was amended in 2024 to allow counties to exempt health departments from this requirement, according to a memo to the commission from Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.

Now, at its meeting on Wednesday, the Douglas County Commission will consider a resolution that would give LDCPH such an exemption.

The state doesn’t provide guidelines on what the sanitary inspection must include, but LDCPH Executive Director Jonathan Smith told the Journal-World what they’ve historically included in Douglas County. They involve things like assessing plumbing systems to ensure proper functioning, verifying the absence of hazardous chemicals, overseeing insect and rodent control and ensuring fire safety measures are in place.

But Smith also told the Journal-World that other departments, including Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical, already completed similar inspections on a regular basis for schools in the county. He said it would be redundant for his department to repeat this work that other agencies were already doing.

“It’s just a matter of these inspections already being done by multiple other stakeholders … who look at the same things that we will be looking at,” Smith said. “So we just want to be efficient with our resources and the county’s resources.”

If the department no longer has to do the annual school inspections itself, that frees up resources to perform necessary inspections of other sites across the county that don’t have as many other agencies looking at them. The memo said that currently there are two full-time employees who perform an average of 80 hours of inspections a month across Douglas County, including inspections of swimming pools, septic tanks, tobacco shops and cereal malt beverage retailers.

Smith said that even if the department’s request for an exemption were granted, the department would still always respond to environmental and public health complaints, even ones that involved a school. He added that pool and child care inspections would continue at school buildings and grounds.

Despite the statute only having been amended in 2024, the possibility of counties exempting their health officials from the state requirement is not new, and two of the most populous counties in Kansas have exercised that option.

According to the memo, the ability for counties to opt out existed in state law prior to 2020, as well. That option went away during the COVID-19 pandemic, and lawmakers restored it to the statute last year. The memo said that Sedgwick County, home to Wichita, and Johnson County had both opted out, but it didn’t specify when.

“They’re a much larger county than ours too, but for the same reason that we’re asking to exempt ourselves, it was the same reasonings that they listed,” Smith said of Johnson County. “Because there’s so many different entities that already do these inspections that it would just be doing the same inspection multiple times by other agencies.”

Because the resolution is a “charter resolution” — one which exempts a county from all or part of a state law — it must be approved by a supermajority, or at least four of the five commissioners, to go into effect. It would also be subject to to a sixty-day protest period before it becomes effective, during which county residents would be able to file a protest petition.

In other business, county commissioners will:

• Consider authorizing staff to submit an application for a grant application in the amount of $50,000 for a study to provide information about hazardous materials that travel through the county via highway, rail, pipeline and air. The goal with the study is to better plan for, respond and recover from disasters.

The application was sent on behalf of the Douglas County Local Emergency Planning Committee and facilitated by the Emergency Management department. According to the grant application, the responsibility of responding to disaster events falls upon the local emergency personnel in the early stages, followed by assistance and experts from other jurisdictions.

Douglas County last conducted a similar study in 2021 which included Jefferson and Osage counties. “Another study is necessary especially because there is a new Panasonic Battery Plant just across our East border in Johnson County,” according to the application.

• Consider authorizing the purchase of legal services for 2025 from John T. Bullock of Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris LLC in the amount of $400,000. Bullock has served as the Douglas County Counselor for nearly 15 years. In March of last year, the commission reappointed Bullock after he joined a new law firm.

• Hold a work session for the criminal justice services to give a department overview. There will be no action following the session, which is for informational purposes only.

The County Commission’s work session will begin at 4 p.m. Wednesday in the Douglas County Commission meeting room at 1100 Massachusetts St. The business meeting will follow at 5:30 p.m. The meeting will also be available via Zoom.