Guthrie County Public Health Administrator Jotham Arber met with county supervisors earlier this week, and during the meeting he expressed his desire to better balance his department’s budget over the next few years.

Arber says that starts with finding better ways of using the funds allocated to Public Health by the county.  He explains his first money-saving idea.

“We’re looking at buying a vehicle for some of our nurses to send them to save us on reimbursement (of gas), and also because we want to put our name onto that vehicle so that people know who we are.  We’d also like to do some other things but we won’t be able to do if we can’t find a way to become more productive.”

If Public Health purchases an agency car before the end of this fiscal year, Arber estimates it could save his department $2,000 annually over the course of what he terms “a five-year pilot project.”

Arber discusses the savings breakdown of having a new vehicle.

“As a county agency vehicle, we can use some of the bulk buying that we do for gas, other maintenance and repairs, which would cost us less than reimbursement.  Right now we pay somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cents a mile.  If we were to have a county agency vehicle, the actual cost to us would be right at the 32/33 cent (mark), so we’d be saving 10 cents every mile.  Then when you figure that our four or five nurses drive about 1,000 miles a month, that (reimbursement) starts to add up really, really quickly.”

During his meeting with the Supervisors, Arber estimated the cost of a new vehicle to be around $5,000.  To hear him talk about this pilot project and other things relating to Guthrie County Public Health in more detail, tune-in to today’s Let’s Talk Guthrie County on K107 during the 9am, noon and 5pm hours.