By Anne Spencer

Published: May 7, 2008

In one of Florida’s worst budget years the fact that a new Jackson County Health Department is set to be funded, after being stricken from the list for so long, is in the words of the department’s director “just shocking.”

Not that it’s bad – it’s great, but 10 years or so in the making.

Director William Long said Wednesday that the announcement of $10.8 million came as a complete surprise. The project had been turned down in 2006 and 2007 when his hopes were high, so in a desperate state budget year, he had dismissed any hope.

Money for planning had come in the late 1990s and the need for a new facility was well documented, but the project never made the cut. After so many disappointments, when he thought of this year’s success, he said he could only conclude, “I think it was just our time.”

The only thing he must hold his breath for now is Governor Crist’s signature on the budget passed by the Senate and the House. That could be weeks away.
“Our efforts to secure funding for a new building are many years old,” Long said. “The effort actually began before I was here, when Jimmy Rigsby was the administrator. So what’s been done since I’ve been here is just continue to let our building condition be known to our legislative delegation, so they could be constantly aware of our needs.”

The building on Fourth Street in Marianna is more than 50 years old and was built for a simpler set of goals and for serving a vastly different group of people from what it now serves.

“I was shocked, just completely shocked” to get on the 2009 budget list, “in a year when budgets were as tight as they were this year,” Long said. “Our staff is excited and we’re all sometimes still shocked about the fact that our project has been funded in such a tight budget year.”

Long said he had some advance notice but the funding was an on-again, off-again thing.

“The announcement came as a surprise when I was first made aware that our project was in the budget. I received a phone call about a month ago from Sen. Al Lawson at which time he told me our project was in the budget,” Long said. “But since that time, our project was out of the budget, in the budget, out of the budget – and that it was taken out of the budget was no real surprise.”

Then in the final week of the session Long said Lawson called once more “and said we have found another fund and your project is in the budget. At this point I was a little optimistic but with a few days still in the session, I didn’t know.

“But in the end I was really elated,” Long said.

Long said that Lawson “no doubt was the driving force, but I want to point out that we had help from Rep. Marti Coley and Rep. Curtis Richardson. Had it not been for those members of our team, I’m convinced we would not have been successful.”

Richardson’s district does not include Jackson County, but the legislator from Tallahassee is a friend and frequent visitor to the county, Long said, also giving credit to Coley’s late husband David who was a legislator, and to Rep. Don Brown whose district includes part of Jackson County.

“He has become aware of our needs,” Long said of Brown.

Long compares the current health building to a 1950s-model car, telliing how out-of-date it is.

“This funding does not come a minute too soon. The building is nonfunctional in terms of this day and age. The building is grossly inefficient,” and requires a great deal of maintenance, Long said.

Until recently the new facility was planned for a donated piece of property on State Road 71 south of U.S. Highway 90. Now an effort is being made to get it built on the former location of the Sykes call center on Caverns Road, a larger site with utilities already in place.