From a box that once held copy paper, William Franks pulled out a stuffed rooster and set it on the table.
“A number of years ago, when it looked like bird flu and not swine flu, we wanted to attract people (to our booth) at the Stark County Fair, so someone went and got this at Flower Factory,” the Stark County health commissioner said with a laugh.
Franks plans to use the prop as a departing present to an unsuspecting employee. He also plans to give away a red brick that Franks said came from the former St. Francis Hotel, where the Health Department once was located, and a red-billed Exit Incorporated hat, a memento of the Osnaburg Township construction and demolition debris facility the department closed in 2002.
The gifts were mingled inside cardboard boxes with family photos, including one of Franks as a teenager with his father, a World War II veteran, at their Peninsula home, along with certificates of accomplishments and educational books about food service regulations and environmental laws — a mix that reflects the county’s longest serving health commissioner’s playful charisma in a job that deals with such serious subjects as food borne illness, communicable diseases and groundwater pollution.
Franks, 64, whose career in public health spans 41 years — from a sanitarian for the Lake County Health Department, to a district sanitarian for the state, to Ohio’s youngest health commissioner with the Columbiana County Health Department to Stark County’s health commissioner for 29 years — officially will retire Tuesday.
THEN AND NOW
Franks paused from packing his office last week to reflect on his career, one that began before the formation of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and before health departments cared about dental hygiene, nutrition and obesity.
“The whole concept of public health has changed,” Franks said. “ ... People are becoming more active and the nutrition and clinical aspects have expanded in the time I have been here.”
When Franks began his career as Stark County’s health commissioner in 1983, he oversaw a department that operated on $732,306 annually, according to Repository archives.
Today, the Stark County Health Department has a $6 million annual budget. It employs 75 full-time workers who serve about 250,000 people living outside the cities of Canton, Alliance and Massillon — which each having its own health departments. The county agency’s duties vary widely from maintaining birth and death certificates to issuing permits for septic systems and wells to immunizations and mosquito control to inspecting restaurants, grocery stores, landfills and garbage trucks to hosting a variety of educational programs.
From a box that once held copy paper, William Franks pulled out a stuffed rooster and set it on the table.
“A number of years ago, when it looked like bird flu and not swine flu, we wanted to attract people (to our booth) at the Stark County Fair, so someone went and got this at Flower Factory,” the Stark County health commissioner said with a laugh.
Franks plans to use the prop as a departing present to an unsuspecting employee. He also plans to give away a red brick that Franks said came from the former St. Francis Hotel, where the Health Department once was located, and a red-billed Exit Incorporated hat, a memento of the Osnaburg Township construction and demolition debris facility the department closed in 2002.
The gifts were mingled inside cardboard boxes with family photos, including one of Franks as a teenager with his father, a World War II veteran, at their Peninsula home, along with certificates of accomplishments and educational books about food service regulations and environmental laws — a mix that reflects the county’s longest serving health commissioner’s playful charisma in a job that deals with such serious subjects as food borne illness, communicable diseases and groundwater pollution.
Franks, 64, whose career in public health spans 41 years — from a sanitarian for the Lake County Health Department, to a district sanitarian for the state, to Ohio’s youngest health commissioner with the Columbiana County Health Department to Stark County’s health commissioner for 29 years — officially will retire Tuesday.
THEN AND NOW
Franks paused from packing his office last week to reflect on his career, one that began before the formation of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and before health departments cared about dental hygiene, nutrition and obesity.
“The whole concept of public health has changed,” Franks said. “ ... People are becoming more active and the nutrition and clinical aspects have expanded in the time I have been here.”
When Franks began his career as Stark County’s health commissioner in 1983, he oversaw a department that operated on $732,306 annually, according to Repository archives.
Today, the Stark County Health Department has a $6 million annual budget. It employs 75 full-time workers who serve about 250,000 people living outside the cities of Canton, Alliance and Massillon — which each having its own health departments. The county agency’s duties vary widely from maintaining birth and death certificates to issuing permits for septic systems and wells to immunizations and mosquito control to inspecting restaurants, grocery stores, landfills and garbage trucks to hosting a variety of educational programs.
Franks says he has long viewed the Health Department as “the stopgap until society catches up,” a philosophy that’s led him to establish the county’s first prenatal and dental clinics and to seek statewide regulations for tobacco cessation. Franks’ crusade for landfill regulations earned him the nickname of “the godfather of construction and demolition debris” during the Association of Ohio Health Commissioners’ fall conference where he was recognized for his years of service.
Randall Flint, who has served as Alliance’s health commissioner for 28 years, called Franks a true champion of public health.
“He’s going to leave knowing he made a difference in improving the health of the community,” Flint said. “ ... They were good at seeing and identifying a potential issue in the community and taking some action to make sure it would not negatively affect the community.”
A key indicator of the community’s overall health — infant mortality rates — shows the community’s improvement during Frank’s tenure.
In the 1980s, the county’s infant mortality rate (number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births) was 12. Today, the four-year average is 7.4.
“I know it’s 30 years, but that’s one success I see,” Franks said.
END OF AN ERA
As health commissioner, Franks has steered the county Health Department through a tumultuous era in public health history. He held the reins in the early 1980s when AIDS first became widely known and health departments faced the challenge of educating people about the fatal disease. He saw the department through the life-changing year of 2001 that included the Sept. 11 attacks, anthrax scares, West Nile virus and the meningitis outbreak that killed two West Branch High School students and nearly claimed the life of a Marlington High girl.
Franks recalled the public hysteria during the meningitis scare that led responders to the unconventional mass immunization of thousands of students, a move questioned and criticized by other health experts. He said the event changed his outlook on public health.
“It kind of mellows you,” said Franks, who wished he had the opportunity to talk to the victims’ families. “It made me look at the human end, the recipient end. ... Instead of looking at the Health Department and its programs as an administrator, I look at it from the community’s end.”
He still believes he and other agencies made the right move with the information they had at the time.
STUCK TO MY GUNS
Throughout his career, Franks has maintained his steadfast attitude in the face of challenges.
“I always felt that if something needed to be done and I had the information (statistics) to back it up, then I stuck to my guns and didn’t let them back me down,” Franks said.
He doesn’t regret moving the department in 1992 from downtown Canton to its current location at 3951 Convenience Circle NW in Plain Township, despite the uproar from city officials, businesses and residents who sued the department to stop the move.
“We need to be out where we serve the people,” he said. “We don’t serve Canton.”
Franks, who started his career inspecting landfills, has spent the last several years battling landfill operators. In 2007, he and the county health board took a stand against the operators of Countywide Recycling & Disposal Facility and refused to issue the Pike Township facility its annual operating license. The decision contradicted the Ohio EPA’s stance.
Kirk Norris, who will succeed Franks, recalls how his boss riled some officials when he said: “I don’t feel we have the legal right to license a landfill that’s on fire.”
“No pun intended, but he did take a lot of heat for that,” said Norris, who has served as director of environmental health since 2005.
Norris believes the conflict — which ended in a court settlement in 2009 — highlighted one of Franks’ strengths as a leader.
“Normally, when you come into a meeting, one person is set on one option; another person is set (against it). ... But he (Franks) could always come up with three, four, five options. That was his foresight,” Norris said.
He recalls sitting in a closed-door meeting of health officials when Franks, seemingly off the top of his head, proposed splitting the Countywide landfill so the county could license the portion of the 258-acre landfill that wasn’t on fire and the state would be responsible for the rest.
“Everybody at the table said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ ” Norris recalled. “But that’s what ended up happening (roughly two years later). ... He got us to the point we needed to be with (presenting) another option.”
SUCCESSOR
Last week, Franks handed the proverbial reins of the department over to Norris during an informal meeting with Stark County Auditor Alan Harold, who serves as secretary of the three-member Stark County Budget Commission that annually approves the health district’s resources and appropriations.
Franks smiled like a proud papa as Norris explained how he has begun an assessment of the entire department and his planned changes to the environmental health division will eliminate a manager position and save the department $50,000 a year.
“The new broom sweeps clean,” said Franks, quoting the popular proverb.
Norris, a Stark County native who began with the Health Department fresh out of college 18 years ago, officially will assume his duties as health commissioner Wednesday.
Franks earned $105,130 during his last year as health commissioner, and is expected to receive roughly $40,000 in unused vacation and sick leave. Norris will earn $87,000 in his first year as health commissioner and $89,610 next year.
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