HERMANN — Cuts to public health funding by the federal and state governments are causing Gasconade County’s top health administrator to curb her enthusiasm.

“Grow, grow, grow has been my goal,” said Health Department Administrator Kenna Fricke during Monday morning’s monthly session of the agency’s Board of Trustees. Now, she said, “I feel like we’ve really got to focus on what we provide well.”

In the past couple years at the helm of the county’s public health agency, Fricke has been wanting to expand services. But after ticking off a list of programs that have suffered funding cuts, Fricke talks more about maintaining what’s already in place and less about expanding the agency’s roster of services.

“It’s hard to plan for long-term (operations) with such a reduction in state and federal funds,” she said.

Indeed, Board President Stan Hall referred to what he called the atmosphere of “uncertainty” regarding public health funding from both the state and federal governments.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen; it’s a mess,” he said, noting that the current concerns reflect the broader issues facing healthcare in the United States. “This country spends more money on health than any other nation and we’re 10th in terms of outcomes,” he said. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he added.

Fricke will be scrambling in the next month to try and assess the potential funding shortfall to county health agencies such as hers as she crafts a proposed operating budget for 2026 and come up with final figures for this year. She was hoping to have a preliminary set of numbers for the trustees to consider at this week’s meeting; however, she has been unable to spend the time needed to do that — thanks in large part to having to leave her office to personally provide services while the department is shorthanded.

“It’s going to take some more time for me to do it,” she said, referring to assembling a proposed budget. “We obviously (will) have a lot more limited funds,” she added.

“I can see where this is going to be a bigger challenge,” Hall said.

Fricke said she hopes to have 2026 budget projections available for the board’s Dec. 29 meeting.

A couple examples of programs losing funds are the Safe Kids Program, which involved the agency providing and helping fit car seats for youngsters, as well as other aspects of child safety, and the Watershed Program in which the Health Department monitored sewer systems an early-warning move in detecting virus outbreaks. Cuts to Watershed funding means the county will no longer be working with the city of Owensville to monitor that community’s wastewater.

“That funding will be gone, as well,” she said. The program did not involve the city of Hermann because there was no easy way for the county agency to collect samples from that city’s wastewater treatment facility.

As for the Safe Kids Program, Fricke said, “That one hurts, even though it didn’t show up on our budget” because it was not money figured into the department’s operating expenses.

The administrator explained that while the agency braces for less funding, it’s also seeing a reduction in the demand for services. For instance, she said that regarding vaccinations, the Hermann office is administering about 79 percent of the number of vaccinations it did last year; in Owensville, that figure has dropped to about 50 percent, she said. However, Fricke said the decrease in vaccinations is not unique to this county. “That’s across everywhere. It’s a concern,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) program is humming along, the administrator said.

“We’re still hanging in there, I’m hoping we’ll see more growth (in use) here” in the Hermann area, she said. Fricke noted that the use of WIC services remains strong in the Owensville area — a result of the demographics of the two portions of the county. Owensville has more families with younger children while the Hermann area has an older population with fewer families participating in WIC.

The Health Department also will be set back in its effort to meet a goal of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services: Receiving accreditation as a public health agency. That accreditation depends, in part, on an agency providing specific types of services.

“With all the cuts, there’s no way we can work toward accreditation this year or next year,” she told the trustees.