Long Beach’s epidemiology labs, built to withstand the worst outbreaks of viruses and disease, from mpox to measles and mumps, are faced with a scourge that will soon sweep the department and render null even the toughest drugs and best research: budget cuts.
More than 70 public health workers are expected to lose their jobs or be reassigned by the end of next month, officials confirmed Tuesday, leaving Long Beach’s viral and disease teams in a weakened state amid a local emergency for tuberculosis and a grueling summer surge of COVID-19 cases.
The majority of the layoffs will eat directly into five programs run by two divisions under the Communicable Disease and Emergency Response Bureau: disability access and functional needs program, epidemiology, health care-acquired infections, communicable disease investigations and vital records. Combined these five programs will lose 63 people, or about 75% of their staff, workers said.
These programs mitigate contagions ranging from the common flu and food-borne illnesses to large-scale threats like sexually transmitted infections, an ongoing local tuberculosis outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic. They also manage the testing and treatment of infected residents and mount vigorous public education campaigns.
“These teams have led and responded to three public health emergencies in the last four years,” said Elizabeth Marquez, a city senior epidemiologist facing a layoff. “Without adequate funding and staffing, we will not be able to track, control, and prevent emerging, multi-drug resistant infections, primarily those affecting our long-term care residents.”
In response, city officials said the cuts were necessitated by the loss of state grant funding and the conclusion of the Long Beach Recovery Act. The act, created as a response to the coronavirus pandemic, marshaled a $297 million patchwork of funds across 85 programs. Nearly 70 are set to end by this year.
“Communicable Disease and Emergency Response Bureau will have the largest impact given the ending of funds from COVID-19 grants,” Financial Management Director Kevin Riper wrote in an 11-page memo released Tuesday.
Over the past month, workers have stood before the city dais to decry the layoffs. Some spoke with rare candor about the importance of their work and questioned how their depleted team might handle the next pandemic.
“We will not be able to support our daycares or schools when they have outbreaks, when parents are calling us,” Marquez said. “Parents won’t be calling us, they’ll be calling you.”
According to Marquez, cuts will leave the bureau “critically understaffed” and unable to meet state accreditation standards and regulations for care or collect data needed when applying to grants that fund much of the city’s health department’s programs.
Riley Carpenter, a city health specialist of four years, said the majority of the staff being cut are “career staff” and “not temporary.” According to Carpenter, this is the third round of layoffs the department has seen since 2022. “We cannot afford to lose more staff,” she added.
As the department braces to lose financing, those who stay behind are girding for bigger caseloads.
“Those who will be left have been placed in an impossible situation,” said Geline Evangelista, a public health nurse, who added that workers were first notified of the cuts last month.
City efforts have been geared toward transitioning the displaced workers into vacant jobs throughout the city, some of which are totally unrelated to their prior work. Workers facing layoffs that don’t “match the qualifications and skill sets” required for their new posts are offered job training, one-on-one career counseling and a review of cover letters and resumes, Riper’s memo stated.
The city also hosted a career fair on Aug. 8 with 12 hiring departments — 36 workers attended.
But workers don’t see why their salaries cannot be funded permanently, by reallocating money from the city’s many vacant positions. The city’s health department has a 32.3% vacancy rate, or 156 budgeted positions that are not filled.
It would cost the city $4.4 million in salaries to cancel the layoffs and retain the health workers, a number that has dropped from $5.7 million after the city found other jobs for 18 workers and four others resigned, according to Riper.
It’s possible a state grant will offer a temporary reprieve, he wrote in the memo:
“Since the State’s budget passed, the public health grants that were planned to be cut have either been restored completely or were only trimmed,” the memo stated. “In some cases, the Health Department is waiting on the State to provide the specific allocation and will restore positions as funding is restored and/or new funds are identified.”
Despite its exponential growth in recent years — 156% since 2021, according to the memo — Long Beach’s Health and Human Services Department relies heavily on grants to pay for programs. This includes those tasked with handling many of today’s crises, including homelessness and coronavirus, who operate under the uncertainty that grants awarded one year won’t exist in the next.
“The heavy reliance on grant funds within our department continues to jeopardize essential programs and threatens community health,” Marquez said. “The city must invest in establishing sustained funding for the health department.”
At the city’s Budget Oversight Committee meeting last week, council members Joni Ricks-Oddie and Robert Uranga lamented the loss of funding and “recognized the critical importance” of the workers.
“It was highly necessary to hire you all and retain you all,” Ricks-Oddie said. “Please know that as council members we are having conversations with our folks in budget, our City Manager’s office. Please know that what you are saying and sharing with us is not falling on deaf ears. We are all trying to find ways to get you placed.”
“I just want to emphasize that, over the last few years, we’ve really come to appreciate the work that our health department does,” Uranga said. “We’ve come to understand that much of the work they do is essential work.
An aide for Ricks-Oddie said Tuesday the council member was not available for further comment.
The cuts are looming as several 19th-century plagues have made a global resurgence. The World Health Organization earlier this month declared that the rampant spread of mpox in Africa is a global health emergency, and might spill across international borders. Across California, syphilis cases are skyrocketing. Long Beach is second in the state for the highest rate in sexually transmitted disease, Marquez said, and a new, drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea is on the rise among youth and young adults.
In 2023, health workers triaged more than 30,000 reported cases of disease and investigated more than 6,000 cases of non-COVID diseases. In the first seven months of 2024, the city has traced 1,665 cases of chlamydia, more than 700 cases of gonorrhea and nearly 150 instances of early-onset syphilis.
“There are many emerging pathogens out there that continue to be looming threats to public health,” Evangelista said, listing Avian Influenza, Candida auris, Dengue, West Nile and Ebola. “Outbreaks of COVID-19, Norovirus, TB, are also still common,” she added.
And Los Angeles County is also reeling from a summer COVID surge, through a subvariant nicknamed “FLiRT.” Positive test rates reached 14.3% at the start of August, with hospitals averaging 479 cases and 403 COVID-positive hospitalizations each day, according to county statistics.
Some workers warned Long Beach will be unprepared ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with one stating Paris saw more than 15 million visitors for its games.
“Imagine what’s going to be floating around our community if we don’t have the medical certifications to deal with these,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a representative from IAM Local 1930, which represents the workers. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”