NUECES COUNTY, Texas — The Public Health District gets funding from two sources -- the City of Corpus Christi and Nueces County. This year, it appears that not much additional funding is on the way.
The City is budgeting $3.6 million for the City-County Health Department, which is a $200,000 increase over last year.
We asked City Manager Peter Zanoni why the City didn't greatly increase the health district budget as we are battling COVID-19 for a second year. He explained that federal grants are going to pay for a lot of what the health district is going to be doing for quite sometime.
"Just that one grant of $18 million, I mean, you can imagine when our general fund is around $4 million annually," Zanoni said. "$18 million is a lot more than that so it's gonna take us some time to execute that and put it into production and we're going to use those dollars first and they will look to see how we can increase the budget going forward."
Part of the budget presentation also showed that Nueces County is funding it's part of the health district at the same rate as last year. County Judge Barbara Canales admitted that more needs to be done.
"We need to invest more," Canales said. "We have made investments along the way. Things like our diagnostic lab machines are definitely improvements but when you look at where we need to be, you've got to make certain you have sustainability."
Another issue that we asked about is the health department's constant request for a new health building to be built.
"Just sitting with the city and the county and letting them know we're going to have to have a plan to have a new building," Health Director Annette Rodriguez said.
Zanoni said that plan is already in the works as they're doing an assessment of the building.
"With the health building, one thing we're looking at is an assessment of the health department operations," Zanoni said. "There was money in this year's budget but it slowed a little bit, but out of that assessment, we'll look at the facility."
Rodriguez said she's been asking for at least the past five years for a new building which will help to better serve the needs of her department and the public it serves.