Since March, Guthrie County Public Health Director Jotham Arber has been the interim environmental health department director.

The late Stephen Patterson was the environmental health director before passing away from cancer. Arber says the current public health facility just had a renovation done to the interior to make it more accessible and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. Now, he wants to move not only environmental health, but emergency management from the courthouse to their facility.

“If we move them up here, it’ll kind of be a one-stop shop for all of the health services that the county provides. Environmental health is going to move to where New Opportunities used to be,  then our EMA, our emergency manager, they are going to move right behind them. So hopefully at the end of the day, we’ll have all health services in one building and we will have an emergency operations center that will be 24/7.”

He adds that they’ve also upgraded their information technology infrastructure to be able to handle the anticipated increase in the number of calls at their facility.