Board of Health - Regular Meeting

Right. We will call the meeting of the Board of Health to order. If everyone could rise and we'll do the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Let the record show that Doctor. Vogel is not here at this time. We assume she's excused. I didn't see any emails. Sorry.

Alderperson Jones and Alderperson Wolf are excused. And so we do have a quorum, so we can continue. So for those of you in the audience, quorum means you have to have so many members of a committee here in order to do business. If for some reason we don't, then we can't take action. Okay? Just so you know. Thanks. I'm seeking 20 five-four-seventy three, I'm seeking a motion to approve the minutes from the last meeting.

So moved.

Okay. Is there a second?

Second.

Excellent. Any comments, questions, changes? All in favor say unanimously. Let the record show that Doctor. Vogel is here. Welcome, Doctor. Vogel. At this time, is there anyone in the audience that you'd like to introduce?

Yes, I'd like to introduce Doctor.

If you can use the

Alexa Bonneville, who's a first year resident here as part of our community health and engagement curriculum. Excellent.

Welcome, Doctor. We welcome you to Appleton, too. So enjoy your time here. All right. Going on to 206. I'm seeking right now a motion for nominations for anyone to serve as the chair of Board of Health.

Chair, I'd like to nominate Kathy Spears

to serve as chair of the Board of Health.

I'll second that. Are there any other nominations for the chair of Board of Health? Nominations for the chair of the Board of Health? Are there any other nominations for the chair for the Board of Health? Seeing none, we'll close that nominations and call for a vote. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed, nay. I'll let the record show that I have accepted the role of Chair of Board of Health again, and I appreciate all of your time and service.

Congratulations, Chair.

25.0477, elect Board of Health Vice Chair. Is there anyone that would like to make a nomination? I can't because I'm chair. So I would assume Doctor. Vogel? Well, I'll nominate Doctor. Vogel. Alright. Is there a second? Second. Alright. Excellent. Sorry. This shows that people are don't always know the correct protocols. So I thank you very much.

Are there any other nominations for the vice chair for the Board of Health? Are there any other nominations for the vice chair for the Board of Health? Are there any other nominations for the vice chair of Board of Health? Seeing none, we're going to close that nominations. I move that we have unanimous support for Doctor. Vogel to serve again as vice chair of the Board of Health. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstaining. Abstaining. One abstention. And I think we have another guest in the audience if doctor Vogel would like to introduce them.

Sure. We've had Doctor. Olivia Ford, a second year resident here as part of her family medicine clinic curriculum. So welcome. Welcome. 250474,

set the Board of Health meeting date and time. Does, 07:00 on the second Wednesday of the month work for everyone? So I'm seeking a motion to set that as our time. So moved. Second. Is there any other comments or questions? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Passes. 20Five-four-seven-five, designate Board of Health contact person. I think that Doctor. Seipers has done a good job. Is there a motion to continue to have him be the contact person? So moved.

Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes. So thank you, Doctor. Siepers, for all your efforts and time. And we appreciate you fielding all those telephone calls on behalf of the Board of

Health. Absolutely.

All right. So we're moving on to information items 20 five-four 80, the Q1 Health Department report, quarterly report. Doctor. Sievers.

Yeah, so I'll just call out a few data points here. In communicable disease control, we are seeing a rather sizable decrease in our overall STD and STD 18. National data is a little bit lagging on this. So it's hard to understand if this is a national trend or something that we're seeing locally. But that's good to see.

Also I would turn to the environmental health section. This is the sort of implementation of the short term rentals or the tourist rooming house project, you see a large increase in pre inspections, sizable increase in the general inspections. That's a direct result of that program. We have, if you can see, ends up being about 60 new licenses over last year at this time. So we went from, let's say, in Q1 last year, we were sitting at about 80 tourist rooming house licenses at the same period.

We closer to about 125 or so at this period. We hope to be around 160 or 175 by the end of the year. And then what we're not tracking, although this is something that we might be looking at here for adding to our performance management system this year, is we were able to track that 38 former short term rentals had become long term rentals, so back into the housing market. So we weren't able to get them licensed, but we were able to get them in a compliant state by moving them to a long term rental. So excited about that.

And then we just note we do see a decrease in weights and measures the of of progress in past. 5% per quarter rather than any one quarter being weighted. So that's what that's about.

Are there any questions? I have a question.

Doctor. Bobo, I know we spent some time on this, so I don't want to spend too much time. But could you just briefly list the types of units that are considered tourist rooming house?

Yeah. So tourist rooming house is a health license designation. And in order to receive that designation, the unit has to be licensable for that purpose. So it has to be a single family dwelling. It could part of a larger structure.

But if it's part of a larger structure, it can only be three units, right? So one of the things that we had seen with this program is that we saw large numbers of units part of multifamily structure that were being rented en masse as a torch rooming house business in that way. That is not licensable under that lodging category. That becomes a different category in the motel space. And so at at that point, there's different zoning considerations, fire code, building code, and that kind of thing.

But the magic number is three or under in terms of total number of units.

So it really becomes those kind of Airbnb and, you know, vacation Yeah. ERBOs and

Okay.

Yep, that's exactly right.

Sorry. Kathleen Fouche.

I just had a question about what determines the lead elevations. How are those determined?

Yeah. So the lead elevations that are identified are those above the federal standard. So it's 3.5 units. Specific units are escaping me off the top of my head. But that was down from the five point zero in the previous standard. Yep.

Between 2425?

No. Let's see what was that. Between 2324.

Okay.

Yep.

But how is the testing done for

Yeah. So that's and that can be any number of screenings. So your primary care providers, peds, WIC will do screening, all of those kinds of things. Or sorry, WIC is not lead. But yes, it's those primary care providers that are providing those.

So it's not handled through the public health department?

No, no, no. But if there's a lead elevation, we become notified. And then that's when we provide that sort of case management around that lead elevation. Because what we'll need to do if it's over a certain limit, not just above the 3.5, but there's actual criteria. So two readings over 15 or one reading over 20 is when we will get involved and do a home inspection, because we have to find the source of the lead.

And so that gets a little bit involved, but that involves doing a physical inspection of the home, doing dust swabbing, or other types of testing to help understand what that source of lead is. And then we track that over time until they get down below that actionable level.

Are there funds for remediation in those situations? Remediation,

well, there is the lead safe home program in the state of Wisconsin. There is a portion of those funds that can be used in that way. So what happens in that case and if there are certain criteria that are met even without a blood lead level that triggers this, we as a local health department will be called into performing a lead safe home inspection. Again, it has to meet certain criteria and is being sought for these federal funds. If there is a high lead level in the home or if there's a source of lead in the home, the lead safe home program will work with a contractor that is licensed to be able to perform that work.

And so

And are all of these elevations in residences? Or are any of them in schools? Because we've been reading about Milwaukee's having older school buildings that

have problems. Yes. Have not seen that. Luckily we have a really good context in where all of our lead laterals have either been changed out or are scheduled to be changed out this year. I will say that it's been two years now, but we did receive some grant funding to perform waterline testing in child care centers.

And we had zero findings. And we had about 75% of the child care centers in the city were part of that program. So I think we were the only grantee of that program that did not see any findings at all. But I think that the lead laterals are a huge portion of that.

Any other questions?

So the vaccine preventable increase, it's looking like pertussis is the main cause. How are you doing with measles? What's going on there?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, and you're keen to pick that up. So we getting rapidly prepared for what could be a local incident in terms of measles outbreak and we're working with the the Tri County area many many partners in that but we're we're getting ready for it and so if we have if a bit of an outbreak we'll be all set for that. We were concerned obviously with the draft. A lot of movement but we didn't see anything out of there.

We partnered with Brown County and we were getting real time data twice a day, any sort of Class Is that would come up. We did not so luckily we were able to get through that. But a lot of festivals and things in the summertime. So we'll wince a little bit every time we see tens of thousands of our closest friends and neighbors outside.

Do you happen to know what our vaccine coverage is for measles?

Off the top of my head I'm I'm not not sure it's it's highly specific. Yeah, it's in the I want to say it's in the ballpark of 86%.

Okay. So we're under. Okay.

Yeah, we're slightly over the state average.

Any other questions or comments? Seeing none, we'll go on to 25.0478. Attached we have the new noise variances and then you can see where we can see some outdoor music through the summer. Any comments, Doctor. Sievers?

No. I'd just say that this is the first year that we have implemented the noise variance fee. And all of the with the exception of one, all of these but one have been issued without any fees, right? So we're looking at those that are either non profits or part of a special event licensing program. So as you can see, there's not been a whole lot of impact in terms of burden on those seeking those variances.

Excellent. Any questions? All right. 209, you'll see attached our beautiful newsletter from Megan. Any comments, Doctor. Seabrus?

I'll just point you to the front page. A lot of quality improvement in the last twelve months in our Weights and Measures program, specifically around billing. A lot of great work Eric Maggio has done in that way. And so the entire issue really talks about either staff with Amy or some of the work that's been done in that area. So really proud of that work.

Well, and I know that all of our partners in that consortium are very happy because we're much easier to work with and we're close if they have a question or whereas when you're working with the state, things tend to not done as fast.

Yeah. That's exactly right. And I would say that part of the QI project last year, we did raise daily rates quite a bit. However, the trade off on that was that we provided all their billing services. So we were the single point of contact for all of those corporate stores and all of that.

So it makes a lot more sense if we've got 10 Dollar Generals, let's say, it takes Eric one call to get all of them paid rather than all of these folks looking at admin staff and turnover and all of these other things. So we did do a satisfaction survey afterwards. And the thing that consistently had come up is that this was the best year that they've ever had because they didn't have to mess with that billing. And Eric's pretty good when it comes to writing formulas and whatnot. So he got it streamlined down to where he could just import a sheet of those particular operations.

And it would spit out various invoices for each one of those. And that was without using any specialized software. So just really amazing in terms of the efficiencies. In fact, I think that we have some capacity to take on another contract or two if that were to come up with Any the stat that we

comments or questions? Okay. I'm seeking a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you.