El Paso health director Vinny Taneja tackling staffing woes, funding gaps New El Paso health director tackles staffing woes, funding gaps- El Paso Matters

Six months into his new job as the El Paso director of public health, Dr. Veerinder “Vinny” Taneja is focused on improving low morale, increasing funding and filling job vacancies.

These are issues troubling local health departments across the country, he said. A robust public health department is key if the city wants to expand free and low-cost services to a community with deep health disparities and large uninsured population – all while facing an expected decrease in federal and state funding.

“You’re going to see some announcement come in the next couple months about some investments the city made for us in terms of facilities and other operations that we can roll out in the community,” Taneja said without providing details.

His more than 20 years in public health have given him experience navigating the cyclical ups and downs of public health funding, Taneja said. With funding on the downward trend, his team is exploring more external revenue sources to hire and retain staff.

El Paso employs the equivalent of more than 260 full-time public health employees as of January, according to a city report. The department has a budget this fiscal year of $18.6 million, more than half of which comes from grants.

Taneja took helm of the El Paso Department of Public Health on Aug. 5 and receives an annual salary of $180,000, according to an offer letter from the city. He reports to Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino. Prior to joining the city, Taneja served as Tarrant County public health director from September 2014 until his contentious departure in February 2024.

The public health department went more than two years without a permanent director before Taneja’s hiring. During that time, Dr. Hector Ocaranza led as the interim director in addition to his jobs as city-county health authority and as a private practice pediatrician in New Mexico.

As the director, Taneja oversees the administration of the city’s public health services, community clinics and grant-funded programs. The department’s duties include:

• communicating the spread of infectious diseases.
• tracking health trends.
• running immunization campaigns.
• supporting the nutritional needs of pregnant and postpartum women.
• conducting food inspections.
• providing preventive care, such as STI testing.

Boosting employee morale

Local health departments are still recovering from burnout, backlash and turnover during the politicized pandemic, which exacerbated already existing shortages in staffing and services.

The majority of the 200 city health employees who participated in an anonymous, departmentwide survey in 2024 answered they were at least somewhat satisfied with their job, according to the findings report obtained by El Paso Matters. Comments about health leadership, mentioned the most in responses, were largely negative, with 43% of respondents saying they did not feel safe to speak up at work.

Ocaranza, who led the department at the time, remains a part of the leadership team. He did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Taneja came to El Paso after receiving his own complaints from staff. He resigned Feb. 6, 2024, from Tarrant County after the Star-Telegram published findings from a human resources report, where more than a dozen current and former employees described a “toxic and hostile work environment” under the leadership of Taneja and deputy director of public health Angela Hagy, who left the department last year. Some of the complaints HR received were directed to Taneja. The county’s human resources department determined no laws had been broken.

Taneja attributed the complaints to the coronavirus pandemic creating a stressful environment, with waves of layoffs and hiring, that led to low morale.

“It was obviously very tough for most public health departments and people who work there because we were out there doing testing, we were out there doing vaccinations, long lines, people were under a lot of stress,” he said.

Taneja said he’s begun trying various ways to build communication and trust during the past six months in El Paso. He told employees he has an open-door policy, meaning people do not need to make an appointment to knock on his door.

He said he takes the time to visit the city’s clinics and shadow workers, such as joining restaurant inspections, to understand their working conditions. He said he is also working with the newsletter committee to communicate with the department the state of public health, funding cycles and new opportunities at work.

“I think a complaint was sometimes programs are so ingrained in responding to COVID or other things, that what’s happening in other parts of public health is not visible and it feels a little disjointed,” Taneja said.

Hiring and retention

Taneja and city leaders are also tasked with reducing the high number of vacancies. 

About 30% of full-time equivalent jobs in the health department are unfilled, according to a city vacancy report. Some of the health department’s vacancies were jobs created from COVID-19-related funding, which the city will eliminate, City Manager Dionne Mack told El Paso Matters in a Jan. 31 meeting.

The COVID-19 Relief Fund makes up 47 unfilled jobs, from licensed vocational nurses to patient navigators, that will eventually be eliminated, according to a list shared by the city. Two-thirds of the remaining vacancies are jobs funded by public health grants, such as WIC clinical assistants and breastfeeding counselors.

Between January 2020 and Taneja’s start date, there was a turnover of more than 300 employees in the health department, according to records obtained by El Paso Matters. About 10% of the departures were retirements while the majority came from resignations and quitting without notice.

The aging workforce has been a topic in the public health community for more than a decade, Taneja said. Some people delayed their retirement to see the country through the pandemic, while younger workers have ventured off to private sector health care with more lucrative pay, he said.

Hiring public health nurses is a challenge, especially when traveling nurses can make higher salaries, Taneja said. Tarrant County would schedule 25 people for interviews and only two would show up, he recalled.

At El Paso, the starting pay range for an entry-level nurse is about $80,000 to $137,000, while the salary for a patient care technician ranges from $33,000 to $54,000, according to job listings posted on the city’s careers website.

Taneja sits on an advisory committee for the master of public health program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He said partnering with colleges can help the department recruit not only degreed professionals, but also vocationally trained workers, such as breastfeeding counselors who do not require a college degree.

One of Taneja’s goals is to also bring stability to leadership. El Paso’s health department saw three different directors during the first years of the pandemic: Robert Resendes, who resigned; Angela Mora, who retired; and then Ocaranza.

Taneja resigned from his own position as director at Tarrant County Public Health after receiving a termination letter from the county administrator, who accused Taneja of engaging in deceptive actions regarding the HIV contact tracing program and billing amount for COVID-19 testing.

“So, these things happen when you get new leadership in places, sometimes they want different department-level leaders and that’s exactly what was happening,” Taneja said. “But that is part and parcel of being in a public health setting or governmental jobs at a high level when administration changes.”

Diversifying funding

The El Paso health department’s budget has declined in the last three years, according to the city’s budget books – more significantly when accounting for inflation. A little less than half of the department’s budget comes from the city’s general fund, the bulk of which is generated from property taxes, sales taxes and fees. Other funding comes from federal and state grants and other sources.

The health department will need to diversify its sources of non-general funding to retain workers and expand services, Taneja said. He projects a financing shortage, which Taneja said he has already discussed with staff in a department-wide meeting.

Mack, who once oversaw the public health department as deputy city manager, said that since programs such as WIC rely on the federal government, “you don’t know where those hits might come.”

“You always had this crazy lag with them because they have grant funding and so we always had a really difficult time filling some of those positions,” Mack said. “When the grant was on towards the end, people start looking for new jobs, and then you can’t hire people in those positions.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order last month to freeze federal grants – which the administration rescinded two days later – caused a flurry of phone calls and meetings, Taneja said.

While programs such as the federal Public Health Infrastructure Grant, which funded the 2024 employee survey, support staffing needs, areas including chronic disease prevention in El Paso remain poorly funded, he said.

Nationwide, local health departments have seen a shortfall or stagnation in finances, which experts say hamstrung the country’s preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the temporary COVID-19-era funding has already ended and some are ending this year, Taneja said.

“You talk to any health department, they’re always looking for different streams of funding,” Taneja said. “This is not unusual for El Paso. We live and die by grants. … We are aware a lot of our positions are grant-funded and if grants go away, sometimes it’s hard to retain everything.”

Taneja said the department is exploring opportunities such as the state’s Medicaid Administrative Claiming and Charity Care Program. 

Health priorities for El Paso

Since moving to El Paso, Taneja recognizes health literacy as one of the main challenges in the border community. Explaining how mRNA vaccines work to the general public is challenging, he gave as an example.

“We really need to make an effort on educating our community on health issues, but in a manner that’s easy to understand,” Taneja said. “What we’ve noticed is if things are super complicated, that doesn’t always sit well with the community.”

Chronic diseases including obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are a top focus in El Paso, as well as communicable diseases such as sexually transmitted infections, he said.

El Paso saw a 426% increase in syphilis cases from 2013 to 2023, following a national trend, as the federal government slashed funding for STI prevention programs.

“What I really enjoy about this community that is very different from other places in Texas is that they’re very open to health recommendations and working with us,” Taneja said.

The health department in partnership with the fire department gave out an estimated 15,000 flu vaccine doses during last fall’s flu campaign – a number unheard of in most Texas communities, which in comparison might give out 2,000 to 3,000 doses throughout flu season, Taneja said.

Immediate goals for the health department include finalizing with Ocaranza a strategic plan to address problems with leadership and turnover, as well as restarting the annual report that’s available to the public. The last annual report was for fiscal year 2020, which provided less health data than in past reports.

City spokesperson Soraya Ayub said the health department stopped publishing its annual report after 2020 because of the pandemic, though it did publish a community health assessment in 2022 in coordination with various organizations in El Paso.

Chronic diseases, mental health and access to health care were among the priorities that came out of that assessment, and the community can expect the unveiling of additional services later this year, Taneja said.

In the long term, Taneja wants the health department to receive accreditation from the Public Health Accreditation Board, which Tarrant County was awarded under his tenure.

The health department must meet certain measures and pass evaluation from the board. Once accredited, the department must report its performance annually to the board and apply for reaccreditation after five years.

Accreditation benefits the health department by focusing improvements on quality, not just quantity of services, Taneja said. It also would put El Paso’s health department on a standardized platform to compare to other accredited health departments, he added.

“Access to health care is a broad topic,” Taneja said. “We can work on access to preventive health care from the public health side. Other access areas are like FQHCs (Federally Qualified Health Centers) opening up more locations, hospitals providing more services and so forth. But public health has a role to play.”