By Lynne Hendricks
STAFF WRITER
July 14, 2009 03:52 am AMESBURY — Heading into tonight's Municipal Council vote on a health services agreement between Amesbury, Salisbury and Newburyport, the three remaining members of Amesbury's Board of Health, who have taken issue with the controversial agreement, are taking a wait-and-see approach. They haven't seen the final document and are hopeful — after participating with five of the eight draft proposals — that the final language in the document reflects their concerns about preserving their board's authority under Massachusetts law, Chairwoman Kristin tenBensel said. "I haven't been given a copy of the latest draft so I haven't been able to look at it," tenBensel said. "It'll be new to me when I got to the Municipal Council meeting (today) as a citizen. I think the last version I looked at was version five, and I think they're on version eight now." TenBensel was invited to speak at an Ordinance Committee hearing on the agreement several weeks ago but was unavailable to attend the committee's final meeting on Thursday, which produced some changes to the contract wording and was then approved for recommendation to the council. The changes weren't substantive ones, said mayoral chief of staff Kendra Amaral, who attended the ordinance committee meeting. TenBensel said ordinance members Robert Gilday, Robert Lavoie, Jonathan Sherwood, Leonard Johnson and Ward Graham appeared to grasp and were open to hearing the Board of Health's concerns at the meeting she attended. "I felt like it was a very positive working relationship with them," tenBensel said. "It felt like we were sort of on the same page. I came away feeling very positive about that." At issue for tenBensel and the board, was that the board should retain the power to appoint health agents, rather than grant such authority to the mayor, as may have been inferred in the original draft agreement. "We wanted to make sure the language was clear about that," tenBensel said yesterday. The board was also concerned about its ability to coordinate emergency preparedness, and to generally ensure the authority of the board as it's backed up by Massachusetts law. "That wasn't always clear in some of those sections," tenBensel said. TenBensel took over as chairwoman of the committee after longtime member Phil Yetman resigned in protest of the initial regionalization agreement, which Yetman and fellow board members were not allowed to view. Another board member, Todd McGrath, demonstrated his frustration a few weeks later by offering his own resignation. Since that time, the board was given the document and invited to sit in on several workshops held by the Municipal Council and Ordinance Committee. But board members still feel a lack of communication from the mayor's office. "Whether by omission or design, I haven't had an e-mail from anybody for weeks now since that meeting," tenBensel said. "I guess I would have thought they would have (given a copy) as a courtesy. I think the viewpoint is that the council makes the decision based on the recommendations of the Ordinance Committee." Beyond restating the frustration over communication, tenBensel said there wasn't much need for rehashing the months-long argument between the board and the mayor's office. "Let the actions speak for themselves," she said. "Actions speak louder than words." The next regularly scheduled Board of Health meeting is expected to feature new regional health agent Jack Morris, and new part-time health nurse Melinda Gibbons. And she and fellow board members are striving to keep up with the changes in Health Department service structure. "It's going to take a while to figure out how this is all going to work, and I understand that," tenBensel said. "I just want to make sure the board has the proper authority to carry out its own functions as a board."
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