photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Douglas County commissioners are pictured at their business meeting on Wednesday, January 29, 2025.

County leaders voted Wednesday to let the city-county health department opt out of doing annual sanitary inspections at schools, stating they wanted the agency to focus on different kinds of inspections that aren’t already being done by other agencies.

On Wednesday, the commission unanimously approved the resolution that would exempt Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health from the state requirement of inspecting schools throughout the county. The department had said it wanted to “reduce the regulatory burden” on its inspectors, and that similar inspections were already being conducted by other agencies, like Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical.

Commissioner Gene Dorsey said that it did look like there were inspections being done by more than one agency. “It’s always good to eliminate duplication of effort and keep things streamlined, in my opinion,” he said.

Commissioner Karen Willey said she often hears constituents calling for inspections on a variety of other things, like septic tanks, and that these would be a more valuable use of staff time than repeating work that other departments have already done.

As the Journal-World reported, Kansas state statutes require local health officers to, “upon the opening of the fall term of school, make a sanitary inspection of each school building and grounds.” The statute was amended in 2024 to allow counties to exempt health departments from this requirement. The law also doesn’t provide guidelines on what the sanitary inspection must cover, but LDCPH Executive Director Jonathan Smith said past assessments included checking plumbing, verifying the absence of hazardous chemicals, overseeing pest control, and ensuring fire safety.

Currently, two full-time employees average 80 hours of inspections per month across Douglas County, covering swimming pools, septic tanks, tobacco shops, and cereal malt beverage retailers. Smith added that 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.

The exemption won’t go into effect just yet, because it is also subject to a sixty-day protest period, during which any county residents who opposed the exemption would be able to file a protest petition.

In other business, county commissioners:

• Authorized county staff to continue legal services provided by John T. Bullock of Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris LLC in the amount of $400,000. Bullock has served as the appointed Douglas County counselor for nearly 15 years. In March of last year, the county commissioners reappointed Bullock after he joined a new law firm.

According to a memo in the agenda, the county’s finance policy requires purchases over $100,000 to be either competitively bid or made through cooperative agreements. Since this is a political appointment by the County Commission, it conflicts with the policy “because it cannot be competitively bid.” County staff recommended commissioners to waive the policy to continue these legal services in 2025.

The memo says that the hourly rate for attorneys and legal assistants at Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris LLC will increase by 3% in each subsequent calendar year. The rate for attorneys in 2024 was $221.70 and $50.67 per hour for legal assistants.

• Authorized staff to submit an application for a grant 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 to and recover from disasters.

The application is being sent on behalf of the Douglas County Local Emergency Planning Committee and facilitated by the Emergency Management department. 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, according to the grant application.

The last time a similar study was conducted was in 2021, and it included Jefferson and Osage counties. The grant application states that “another study is necessary especially because there is a new Panasonic Battery Plant just across our East border in Johnson County.”

• Held a work session for criminal justice services to give a department overview. There was no action following the session, which was for informational purposes only.