Auburn City Councilmember Largo Wales is calling on Auburn residents to make something clear to King County Executive Dow Constantine.
A mince-no-words, piece of their minds about the potential closure of the King County Public Health Clinic in Auburn.
“It is imperative that our humans down here have the quality of life that our salmon are going to have,” Wales said at Monday’s meeting of the City Council.
Imperative, she said, given the cold fact that 10,000 of Auburn’s 74,000 residents last year accessed the Public Health Clinic.
Continual declines in the federal and state funds that support Public Health have led King County to propose the closure of health clinics in Auburn, Federal Way, White Center/Greenbridge, and Bothell.
On Monday, under the threat of a projected $15 million annual deficit starting in 2015, Constantine announced that the county had worked out a partnership with the City of Seattle and Planned Parenthood to keep its Public Health clinic in White Center open.
Under the new partnership, Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest is to provide family planning services and Public Health will continue to provide Women, Infant and Children (WIC) and Maternity Support services for the next two years. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has committed $400,000 in 2015 to help keep White Center clinic open though in a new location and preserve a variety of public health services.
Partnerships with neighboring cities and other entities to keep those services available here are very much a possibility for Auburn, with or without King County, said Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus, who met last week with the interim director for King County Public Health.
“They say they have a $30 million shortfall. Something doesn’t make sense. It looks to me that it costs $2 million to operate, and the revenue generated is $5 million or $6 million, so that’s not a business model I understand — that you wouldn’t spend money to make money. We are still looking at that, and we have another meeting on Thursday. We have not given up on any options yet, and in fact, we are looking at other partnerships.”
According to the Federal Way Mirror, the Federal Way City Council was to have decided Tuesday whether to contribute $221,000 toward the Federal Way Public Health Center’s operating costs for 2015.
The Federal Way clinic currently operates on an approximately $1.2 million annual gap, according to the Federal Way Mirror.
If its Council votes on the one-time expenditure — which would cover 30 percent of the operating costs to keep the Federal Way center open another year — King County would cover the remaining 70 percent, pending labor agreements, Mayor Jim Ferrell told the Federal Way Mirror.
Whether or not anything like that could be worked out in Auburn, and, if so, what the City’s financial obligations would be, remains to be seen.
But here are details of the partnership that will keep the White Center Clinic open for a service area that extends to West Seattle, Burien, SeaTac, Tukwila, and Des Moines.
• Relocation of Planned Parenthood from its West Seattle clinic to Greenbridge, a King County Housing Authority development.
• Continuation of family planning services at Greenbridge, with Planned Parenthood as the service provider.
• Creation of a family planning “access committee” to provide countywide accountability and oversight, and assurance that all county residents maintain access to the full range of • FDA-approved contraceptive methods; services for prevention and treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases for men and women; and screening for cervical cancer.
Continued provision by Public Health of Maternity Support Services and WIC services at Greenbridge.
The partnership with Planned Parenthood provides family planning services for all – regardless of ability to pay – at the same location where Public Health has served the White Center community for more than 50 years, primarily assisting women, mothers, and young children.
The service area of the White Center clinic extends to West Seattle, Burien, SeaTac, Tukwila, and Des Moines.
“White Center families are from many different backgrounds – Latino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Somali, Samoan – and our Public Health staff helps them navigate important issues like nutrition, breastfeeding, and physical activity,” said King County Councilmember Joe McDermott, who is also chair of the King County Board of Health. “These are all important components of families raising healthy babies and thriving young children.”
Centers in downtown Seattle, Bellevue, Renton and two in Kent will remain open.
