Request By:
Hon. David R. Choate
Clinton County Attorney
212 Washington Street
Albany, Kentucky 42602
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Joseph R. Johnson, Assistant Attorney General
In your letter to this office dated October 4, 1979, you state that the Clinton County Fiscal Court withdrew from the Lake Cumberland Health District in 1976 but now wishes to rejoin the Health District. However, a majority of the seven (7) member Clinton County Health Board wishes to remain a county health department independent of the Board. Your question is whether the Clinton County Fiscal Court can reenter the Lake Cumberland Health District without the concurrence of the local board. 1 The answer is yes.
KRS 212.040 provides that the county fiscal court has the authority to create, establish and maintain a county health department. The statute states that the department may be created by a resolution of the fiscal court and shall be created, established and maintained through the expenditure of the county funds or through a levy if there are not sufficient funds to make the department operational. The county health department is a creature of the fiscal court.
KRS 212.840(1) provides that district boards of health may be created by the fiscal courts of the particular counties within the district delineated by the Department for Human Resources. 2 Although KRS 212.850(2) provides that the Department for Human Resources must certify that the district is established and must allocate state funds to the district health departments, the district boards may only be created by action of the county fiscal court. When the district department of health is created, all powers and duties of the county boards except as provided under KRS 212.920, under existing statutes, are transferred to the district board of health.
This office is of the opinion that because the local health board is a creature of the county fiscal court and because the statute authorizes the fiscal courts of the counties in the district to establish, maintain and operate a district health department, the local health board can be merged with other local health boards without any concurrence of the local health board whatsoever.
Footnotes
Footnotes
1 The Lake Cumberland Health District includes the counties of Cumberland, McCreary, Pulaski and Wayne.
2 As we noted in OAG 74-700 (copy enclosed) the district boards of health cannot be created in any other manner.