ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
With cuts being made to the federal budget, many government agencies are seeing their funding being cut as well at state and local levels.
Those reductions include the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women Infants and Children (WIC) program, and as is the case with many other counties, Seward County’s WIC program is feeling the pinch of these decreases.
Seward County Health Department Administrator Brie Greeson reported Monday, WIC will not get its fourth quarter funding from the feds.
“WIC is traditionally 100 percent reimbursable and does bring in about $800,000 to $1 million in the community,” she said. “We were allotted $440,000 to spend in our fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025.”
Health department officials, Greeson said, were notified in mid-June the department’s budget needed to decrease to $381,000 effective immediately.
“At that point, multiple conversations were being had,” she said. “Questions were being asked. This was statewide. Some counties took a larger cut. Some counties didn’t take cuts at all. We got penalized for being good stewards of our money by the state. The ones that overspent got alloted to keep that. We were told, ‘You guys were doing so good, we’re going to cut yours.’”
With three months until the end of the fiscal year, Greeson said the WIC budget needed to be quickly cut by $59,000.
“In the WIC department, we were able to cut hours for staff down to 32 a week from 35,” she said. “We cut all education and other expenses that hadn’t already been paid and canceled and got refunds for the things we could. With those changes, we’ve been able to cut $25,000 on our own to add further complications to it.”
Longtime WIC Director Tiffani Krause has decided to retire a year early, and Greeson said current WIC nurse Tammie Thompson will need to be trained to take over the WIC director’s position. Greeson added federal leaders said WIC funding would be unable to offset any money over the requested $381,000 for the local department’s budget.
“There’s a very slim chance they will get fourth quarter funding from the feds, and they told me to go talk to my commissioners,” she said. “We’re not getting anything.”
With all of this in mind, Greeson asked county commissioners to help offset the additional costs of about $35,000 to finish the current budget year, train Thompson and keep staff at 32 hours per week through September.
Commissioners unanimously approved using $35,000 from the county’s general fund Sales Tax Health Initiative Fund (STHIF) to offset those costs, and Greeson said this will finish WIC’s budget year, allow for Thompson’s training and keep staff at 32 hours a week through September.
“The state does anticipate we should get our full amount we’re asking for starting Oct. 1, 2025,” she said. “They did commend us for operating at $1.50 an hour less than all of the other WIC departments.”
Naturally, Greeson found the news of not receiving fourth quarter funding from the feds disheartening.
“We’ve had a lot of ups and downs in the last few months, and this was the final cherry on top,” she said.
When Greeson got the news, Seward County Administrator April Warden met with her, Landfill Supervisor Brock Theiner and county auditor Dustin Ormiston, and Warden said $650,000 had been allocated from the Sales Tax Health Initiative Fund to the health department.
“She has so many grants, and you can’t mess with that dollar figure a lot because everything’s done on a matching process,” Warden said.
Without the additional funding, Warden said some of WIC’s employees would have to be let go until October, and adding to that difficulty would be telling those workers to come back at that time.
“There’s a lot of training that goes into that area as well,” she said. “They have to have 80 training hours to be able to work in WIC, and those employees have already been certified and have already had that training to work in the department.”
Warden explained the remainder of STHIF funding goes into the general fund, which also has other funding for the health department, and money from the fund must be used for health expenditures.
Warden did say, however, Ormiston recommended taking vaccination funding from the general fund for the $35,000 needed to fund SCHD for the rest of the fourth quarter.
“You would be taking that from your general fund sales tax initiative, and you’re not messing with her grant funds or her matching dollars if you do it that way,” Warden said. “We do have vaccines and Life Care labs we could take out of the general fund for now.”
Greeson said health department officials are hoping state leaders will get to a point where SCHD leaders know what they will and will not have moving forward.
“The typical problem I have with my budget is because I run in three different grant years, when things like this happen, if the rest of my programs aren’t fully funded, I’m half in the county year and I’m half in the state year, and it really starts to mess with those numbers on paper,” she said. “I hope we don’t have any other issues, and everything else goes accordingly, but this will get us through the WIC year that will start Oct. 1.”
With the funding, Krause can finish out her 20th year with the WIC program and train Thompson to take over the department.
“It still gives us the leeway to not lay those people off, possibly pay unemployment to try to have them come back when the state’s saying we should be able to our full funding Oct. 1,” Greeson said.
Greeson said the local WIC program, as are all WIC programs, is totally reimbursable.
“What normally happens is I fill out those affidavits monthly,” she said. “They get sent into the state, and they reimburse us dollar for dollar. When whatever snafu happened with them, they were leading us on that we were going to get fourth quarter funding and to keep going, and then just boom, we were told, ‘Nope you have to do it.’ I told them at the state last week, and they said we’re not going to get it. If we do, it’s going to be basically a miracle, and ‘you need to go talk to them about it.’ It will not be refundable.”
Commissioner Todd Stanton asked if the money WIC gets from the state is actually allocated. Greeson said it was, and she has talked to many state officials, who all seem to have different answers regarding the funding problem.
“WIC went through a big change in the last five years,” Greeson said. “They’ve typically had one of the longest standing staff inside the state. The longest one who’s there right now just retired. I don’t think they understand how tough it is for these programs to fluctuate like they are. As a county, we’re going to make $800,000 to $1 million on it. They’re going to reimburse it, and that’s great business.”
Greeson said many other counties are struggling just as Seward County is at this time trying to figure out how to offset costs for the same reasons.
“They don’t want to let go of the staff,” she said. “They don’t want to have to pay unemployment and ask them to come back in a couple months. My fear is we’re going to have a big uptick in WIC because some of the smaller counties are getting cut substantially, and whether we like it or not, those funnel right into us, but that does come back to us with the money they’re spending in the county too for those WIC benefits.”
Greeson thanked the commission for the approval of funding from the STHIF account, and she said that “thank you” extended to the staff at the local WIC office.
“They have been doing a lot of really hard things for their families, and I know they’re very much going to appreciate this,” she said. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
