Deep budget cuts in Macomb County compromise water safety

Macomb County environmental health program specialist Robert MacDonald shows off the county's soon-to-be scaled back hazardous waste program. (Photos by David Alire Garcia/Michigan Messenger)

MOUNT CLEMENS — Macomb County faces an all-too-familiar Michigan problem these days: plunging property tax collections leading directly to decimated public budgets.

But here in the state’s third most populous county, downsizing the budget means supersizing the risk of contaminated water, among other public health calamities.

“We have an extremely serious revenue problem,” Thomas Kalkofen, director of the Macomb County Health Department, told Michigan Messenger last week.

Already, the county has shed all of its parks employees. Over several rounds of budget cutting this year, 79 full-time positions have been eliminated overall, including 27 layoffs, from a county workforce that currently counts 2,200 workers.

County leaders knew that deep budget cuts were necessary this past summer, when the county’s finance team estimated a grim $15.7 million deficit for the coming fiscal year which begins on Jan. 1.

That’s nearly 7 percent less than this year’s $231 million budget.

And if there’s one thing that’s already clear about the county’s budget for next year, it’s that a proactive approach to public health is about to get sickly.

Earlier this month, all but four of the county’s 26 elected commissioners voted to slash the Macomb County Health Department budget by $2.1 million — an 8 percent reduction compared with last year’s level of funding.

At a conference table adjacent to his office, Kalkofen flipped through the pages of a thick report to recall the success of one of the water safety programs he doesn’t expect to keep.

Over the last three years, he explains, department staffers walked 1,500 miles of county drains looking for illegal raw sewage discharges into the Clinton River or Lake St. Clair.

Finding the right page, Kalkofen described the result:

Here it is. There were over 8,800 investigations and we found 1,300 problems. Based on our calculation, this equates to 75 million gallons per year of untreated sewage that was removed from the waterways in the county, through that program.

Macomb County Heath Department Director Tom Kalkofen

Beginning next year, Kalkofen’s staff will only be able to respond to reports from vigilant residents that sewage is contaminating the county’s surface water supplies. He said he can’t commit to any systematic checks of the county’s drains going forward. “We will try to do them as we can,” Kalkofen said.

In an impromptu tour of the Macomb County Health Department’s household hazardous waste program — another public health program slated for steep reductions — program specialist Robert MacDonald proudly shows off the shipping containers marked with signs that read “dangerous” or “poison” used to store what residents drop off.

“We get a lot of pesticides. We get a lot of flammable waste. We get a lot of gasoline from boaters and from people who’ve got historic cars,” MacDonald explained, pointing out where each kind of waste is separated. “We get a lot of paints and, obviously, strippers. We get chemistry projects from school sometimes. We had an occasion where we took in formaldehyde with some frogs in it.”

He goes on to speculate that reducing the convenience of regular hazardous waste drop off days will likely mean that more waste oil, for example, will find its way into landfills via curbside trash pick-ups.

“I know one thing,” MacDonald added, citing his participation on a Lansing hazardous waste committee: “We have one of most frequent collections throughout the state.”

But that frequency — including the monthly drop off service in Mount Clemens as well as satellite service in some of the county’s other population centers — will likely be reduced to one centralized drop off day every three months, Kalkofen noted. And no more satellite drop off service.

“During the last satellite collection we had in Warren, which was in September, we did 788 cars in five hours,” MacDonald said, citing what will likely be the last time for that service. “That was a lot of people and they had a lot of waste.”

Kalkofen, thumbing through another report, noted that last year over 3,600 county households brought in over 250,000 pounds of household hazardous waste for safe disposal.

That figure included, he said, 1,900 pounds of “expired, non-controlled medications,” that otherwise would probably have been flushed down the toilet.

Setting down the papers on the table, his voice rising slightly, Kalkofen asked: “You know how much a pill weighs?”

Even the county’s water sampling program designed to ensure that the county’s beaches along Lake St. Clair are safe for recreation — a program that dates back to the 1950s — is about be dramatically scaled back. Due to the cutbacks, the frequency of sampling for E. coli and other contaminants, at 60 sites will probably be reduced by half.

This past summer alone, Kalkofen said, his department’s inspectors were able to recommend the equivalent of 90 beach-day closures because of unsafe contaminant levels.

“We probably have the most comprehensive beach testing program for sure in the state,” he added, “and possibly in the United States.”

The imminent decline of the Macomb County Health Department’s water safety programs particularly along the western shoreline of Lake St. Clair gives a local environmental activist like Cyndi Roper, director of East Lansing-based Clean Water Action, reason for alarm.

“When we look at a place like Lake St. Clair, which is the drinking source for literally millions of people, we’re extremely concerned,” she said.

Roper is especially concerned that Macomb County will no longer be able to actively search out and repair discharges of sewage into the lake.

“It’s hard to imagine that here we are in the 21st century, and we’re still dumping untreated human waste into our drinking water sources and our recreational places,” she said. “That is really hard to comprehend.”

In a memo to the Macomb County finance director last month, Kalkofen estimated the likely loss of health department services in the wake of staff cuts.

“The personnel loss will directly result in a reduction of services or elimination of programs in the following areas,” Kalkofen wrote. He went on to list 25 specific areas, including water quality, community health and clinic services.

As if the Macomb County’s budget prognosis couldn’t get any worse, the most recent round of cuts still leaves another $6.5 million yet to be eliminated by the end of next month. Even after that, county budget planners expect a $16.5 million deficit the following year as revenue from property taxes is predicted to drop another 13 percent in 2011.

The county budget committee is scheduled to meet on Nov. 23 to discuss cuts in the sheriff’s department, substance abuse and mental health programs, as well as the county prosecutor’s office.

Asked if county commissioners might restore some of the cuts to the health department, MacDonald’s first reaction was an exasperated laugh.

“There’s always that hope,” he said. “But I’m not optimistic.”

Meanwhile, Kalkofen, director of the soon-to-be scaled down health department, echoed that pessimism, adding that a tax hike just isn’t realistic right now. “The way public health services are delivered in Macomb County is going to change,” he said. But he added a defiant note in spite of the cuts.

“We recognize what our role is in the community,” he said. “We won’t turn our back on that.”