OTTAWA COUNTY — The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners approved the next budget for the county on Tuesday with little fanfare — with the exception of the removal of a $900,000 grant for the public health department.

The Ottawa Impact majority on the board, led by Chair Joe Moss, said the grant was a last-minute addition to the budget and that its “COVID” label was the state irresponsibly incentivizing taxpayer spending on a pandemic that is now over. 

Now county health officer Adeline Hambley is setting the record straight.  

When the board discussed the issue at the top of the Tuesday evening agenda on Sept. 24, Moss said the grant was added about a week prior by the health department, a fact Hambley disputes.

“We submitted this grant as part of our budget proposal that was submitted in May,” Hambley said. 

Hambley said she met with Interim Administrator Jon Anderson and fiscal services staff in June or July to go over the department’s budget, which included the infection prevention grant from the state.

“When we met with the administrator and fiscal services, we specifically talked about that grant,” Hambley said. “Usually the administrator would bring these things to the attention of the board, but I'm not sure if that happened here or not. Apparently, if they think it just came out last week, that doesn't seem like it did.”

Hambley said she communicated with the appropriate counterparts in the county to provide all the information, and that there were no concerns raised prior to the board’s Tuesday discussion.

“I can say no questions or no concerns were ever brought to my attention throughout the whole process, and they weren't raised during any part of the budget review and our public meetings,” Hambley said. “So I wasn't in attendance at the board meeting last night to address anything. Just … nothing was raised.”

On Tuesday, Ottawa Impact Commissioner Gretchen Cosby, who is chair of the county’s Health and Human Services Committee, restated claims first made in summer 2023 when she said she didn’t get information she requested from the health department to better understand Hambley and her staff’s work.

“Those metrics have been continually provided,” Hambley said. “When Gretchen wanted the metrics for all the county departments, we provided that. Even last week at Health and Human Services, I presented on the communicable disease report and (gastrointestinal) illness report and directed them to the data and statistics section of our website for additional reports and information. So I'm not sure where the whole metrics thing that she keeps bringing up that she hasn’t gotten for 20 months — we’ve provided metrics like crazy.”

On Tuesday, Moss approving the grant, even if the county didn’t utilize the funds, would encourage the state to “incentivize” spending on COVID-19.

“I understand the state would like to continue to incentive spending in this area,” Moss said during a discussion on the grant. “I don’t think that we need to pre-plan to spend $900,000 on communicable diseases and COVID.”

Hambley said, that although the grant in question has the word “COVID” in its title, the funds can be used for any infection-prevention activities and training. 

“Ultimately, it's $900,000 for infection-prevention activities, which are activities that we have to do and are mandated to do under the law,” Hambley said. “This allows us to offset some of the general fund county dollars. So I think it's a little bit disappointing that we don't get to offset our county general fund dollars — tax dollars — with this funding.

She explained that a unique aspect of the grant is that it could be used to cover department overhead costs, not just direct services.

“We have legally mandated work to prevent communicable disease spread and infections and outbreaks and everything else we have to do; this would just allow us to offset the costs to this grant, because this grant is a little bit unique, in that it allows us to charge county admin overhead costs to it, not just direct health department costs, which is a little unusual,” Hambley said. 

“Most grants don't allow us to do that, and so a lot of administration costs, and health department administration costs can get offset when we can charge any of our time and activities that are directly related to infection-prevention activities to this instead of to our general fund budget,” she said.

Moss renewed his claims that the state overstepped its legal authority during the pandemic when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issued COVID-19 mitigation measures that mandated masks in school and social distancing. 

That put Moss at odds with the Ottawa County Health Department after the private Christian school he founded in Hudsonville was shuttered briefly after staff didn’t follow the mandates.

Moss and Vice Chair Sylvia Rhodea founded Ottawa Impact in 2021 over their frustrations with Whitmer’s and MDHHS decisions that guided local decisions at the county health department.

When Commissioner Doug Zylstra, a Democrat, suggested that it was wise to take the grant in case the county saw an unexpected outbreak of infectious disease, Moss pushed back.

“There's no need to access this grant if we don't need the funds,” Zylstra said.

“Why would we need to access a COVID grant?” Moss replied.

“​​We don't know. That's the whole point. If we don't need it, we don't need it,” Zylstra said.

“A cost for what? An emergency?” Moss said. “The current budget covers that. They're fully funded. I'd rather not plan for another COVID emergency.”

Moss and Rhodea went on to remind Zylstra of the "thousand parent march" he led in 2021 over the state's COVID-19 mitigation measures and "their reign of tyranny over the county."

Hambley said it’s unfortunate that wide-ranging public health conversations at the board level seem to be stuck on COVID. 

“There's so many things on the horizon outside of COVID,” she said. “There's always stuff, right? It's just the nature of people — diseases.”

She pointed to Candida aureus, a fungal infection that causes severe multidrug-resistant illness in hospitalized patients. Cases have been reported in Michigan, but so far none in Ottawa County. 

“I think that's really important. The money is for preventing infection, not just responding to when we already have a large group of people impacted in a negative way,” she said. “It's preventing that large group of people from being negatively impacted in the first place.”

Hambley said it’s short-sighted to not have a plan for health emergencies.

“The goal is to prevent the serious consequence,” she said. “We're doing on a community level what doctors try to do on a patient level. The doctors try to manage diabetic symptoms so they don't have to have their feet amputated.”

Despite Moss and Rhodea claiming that they were saving taxpayer dollars by not accepting the grant from the state, Hambley said the health department has a legal obligation to respond to any health outbreaks and that the money will now come from the county’s general fund and will not be offset by the offered additional funding.

“All it means is that we'll be expending general fund dollars rather than these other grant dollars for our activities and our duties that exceed what’s budgeted,” she said. “If there were a large-scale event, we would need to do a ‘BA,’ a budget adjustment, that would go before the board.”

Moss said the department could go before the board if it needed additional funding, in the event of an emergency.

Hambley said the board would then “have that level of control, however, there are requirements and laws for the health officer to respond to public health emergencies and public health events, and that can't be hamstrung by funding.”

She also remains skeptical that requests from her department would be handled promptly and appropriately, after several funding requests went ignored during Hambley’s yearlong lawsuit against the board after the OI commissioners attempted to improperly demote and fire Hambley. 

In February, the two parties settled the lawsuit, with Hambley remaining in her role and the county paying more than $188,000 for her legal fees.

Read More: Judge orders Ottawa County to pay $188K for health officer's legal fees after yearlong lawsuit

“Requests that we've made before to the board this past year for additional funding have not been approved and have not been expeditious,” Hambley said. “There are concerns with how speedy it would be in front of them and considered in the event of an emergency.”

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During its meeting Tuesday, the board voted 6-4 to reject the grant and approve the budget without it.

Hambley said it’s possible that the funding could still be there next year — when a new set of incoming commissioners likely will lead to OI losing its majority on the board. However, she said, there are no guarantees.

“We can always go back and ask the state to amend the contract with us,” she said. “Now, that doesn't mean that they'll have the funding available to give to us, but we can ask at a future date. It's not a guarantee that it's there.”

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