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Trumbull health board reaches agreement for new health commissioner
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The Trumbull County Board of Health has approved a contract with Frank Migliozzi to become the next health commissioner and administrator, effective Jan. 1.
His term begins at the end of the contract of James Enyeart.
Migliozzi, longtime director of environmental health, will be paid $102,000 for the two positions.
Enyeart, 63, who became health commissioner in 2002, said he’s interested in retaining one of his three current positions. Enyeart makes $134,869 for the three positions – health commissioner, administrator and medical director.
A contract has been written that would pay Enyeart $45,000 per year to be medical director, but the board has not acted on it.
The board did approve at its meeting earlier this week posting internally for Migliozzi’s current position of environmental health director.
Enyeart said he is leaving now at the time he intended – after Migliozzi obtained the necessary education to qualify to be health commissioner.
Enyeart said he thinks the county has made a lot of progress regarding its sewage practices since he became health commissioner in 2002.
The Ohio Department of Health and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency were not happy with the county’s sewage practices in 2002, he said.
Enyeart spoke with those agencies before he took the job of health commissioner but after the EPA had sued the county asking for more sewers to be installed to reduce the amount of sewage being released into the environment.
The county settled that suit in 2006, agreeing to install sewers in a number of areas that had the worst groundwater contamination.
County Commissioner Frank Fuda says the county has reduced the number of septic systems by 17 percent since he took office in 2007 by constructing numerous sanitary sewer lines.
“The county commissioners rarely stepped up to the plate” to build sewers before the agreement with the EPA, Enyeart said.
The health board also changed its regulations to reduce the number of septic systems that discharge household waste into streams and other water sources. The health department secured $1 million in grants over 10 years to help people upgrade their septic systems, Enyeart said.
Enyeart said he believes Migliozzi can take the health board further along a path of modernization.
“I believe at some point, our county will look like other more-progressive counties. I believe we are no longer the problem we once were,” Enyeart said.