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City Manager provides update on future health department at City Council meeting

Peter Zanoni says they are using a 10-step plan to evaluate programs that the current health district has and making sure employees are involved in the process.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The City of Corpus Christi moving forward with their soon to be city health department City Manager Peter Zanoni provided an update during Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

Zanoni says they are using a 10-step plan to evaluate programs that the current health district has and making sure employees are involved and any lingering questions they may have get answered.

“It’s not just so we can take what we have and copy and paste, but rather how can we innovate, how can we do something different if we need to,” said Zanoni. “How can we bring in those best practices into the new department and so we’re doing that.”

Zanoni says they’re implementing focus groups for employees to be part of.

“To help give us even more input-on things like the building and asset management, how can we better improve those,” said Zanoni.

According to the city manager, employees are feeling more at ease with these focus groups and weekly meetings. When it comes to the positions in the department, they’re working their way from the top making sure the manager roles are filled.

“We posted the five managerial positions for about a 2-week period. They closed last Friday so some of these major program heads will be selected soon,” said Zanoni. “The postings were all for internal personnel only. So, the employees that are working today were the only ones eligible to apply for those managerial positions.”

Once those positions are filled Zanoni says they will advertise for the positions within the programs and make sure managers are involved in the hiring process, but they’re also looking at pay increases.

“One negative effect of the district is that neither side have adjusted pay ranges because we couldn’t agree on what the range can be so these employees are really below market pay and every one of them will probably have a pay range adjustment because of that phenomenon that exists in this dated model,”

When it comes to the biggest position, health director, a recruiter is helping the city.

“He’s creating the job specification now and soon we’ll be advertising locally, state and nationally for that position,” said Zanoni.

Zanoni adds that the city has 10 grants with 24 grant funded positions and that is going to take a little bit more time, but they are already working on it.

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