ORDER-2022-27 : Appointment of Anthony Chui to serve as Health Director for the City of Melrose

Transcript (~6 min @ 1:50:30)

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▶ 1:50:34 Maya Jamaleddine: Mr. Kelly and we have now ordered 2022-27 appointment of Anthony Chu to serve as Health Director for the City of Monroe's this order is offered by Mayor

▶ 1:50:56 Paul Brodeur: Paul Broder and do we have Mayor Broder yes ma'am and again I want to thank you you for the time and consideration that you're putting into this nomination. Hopefully, some of you have had an opportunity to meet Mr. Chu at the Victorian Fair, where we extended the invitation and he offered to stop by for a couple of hours and ended up staying around five hours, getting to know, starting to get to know some of the folks in the community and hear about their concerns I am extremely proud to offer his name and denomination as you know this is something of a joint appointment would be the health director of the Melrose and Wakefield district but in past of course is prologue with this position as you know we went through a very thorough recruitment process and quite frankly had an initial round of applicants that we weren't entirely satisfied with and decided to reopen the search and I'm happy to say that paid tremendous dividends when you're trying to fill a position that is occupied by someone like Ruth Clay retired after 25 years of service to the city and really built the Health Department from the ground up it was very very reassuring and in confidence inspiring to see Anthony step forward for this position and really to distinguish himself among a very high quality group of applicants. I certainly want to thank Ruth Clay for setting the table. I want to thank our now interim health director or former interim health director, Elaine Sylvia, who, as you all know, came out of retirement to help us bridge the gap between Ruth's retirement and where we are today. She has been an incredible asset We were very fortunate to have her, and I hope that she rejoins the Wakefield Board of Health to continue her service in that community. But it is now my distinct pleasure to talk a little bit more about Anthony for the health director portion of the Melrose part of the job, I guess I would say. If you've had a chance to read his resume, I think you'll agree it is outstanding we're very fortunate to have Anthony here. He is an epidemiologist with two bachelor's degrees and things that we could all use a little bit of education in these days with biology and applied stats. And also significantly, sorry about that, has a master's in public health from Yale University. He comes to us from the city of Manchester, New Hampshire, where he served as a public health specialist. During that time, he developed community prevention strategies to address disease and health risk mitigation behaviors, particularly pertaining to opioid or substance misuse. He was also responsible for disseminating COVID-19 response information, as well as conducting data analysis related to community spread and outbreak investigation things that obviously uh in our in our current situation are critically important to the work that we are doing and will continue to do um also lining up with our city's goals and objectives anthony was appointed chair of the diversity equity inclusion committee in manchester and we are very fortunate to find a candidate of such outstanding qualification that also shares our commitment to advancing public health through an equity lens The technical skills alone that he brings, along with his strong educational background and his experience really working on the front lines of COVID-19 response, really identified him as the superior candidate during what was a very rigorous recruitment process. I look forward with the opportunity to work with him as we continue to respond to the pandemic and take on all the other public health challenges that we know exist. so i again am delighted to recommend him for your consideration and urge your uh consideration and approval of his nomination thank you all very much thank you mayor brother and if you don't mind we

▶ 1:55:29 Maya Jamaleddine: would like to it's 8 5 16 right now actually and would like to go to um full council meeting and then uh we can suspend the rules and go back and uh vote on this order madam chair motion to adjourn

▶ 1:55:51 Speaker 2: motion for recess

▶ 1:55:58 Maya Jamaleddine: we have motion uh for recess made by um counselor sewer seconded by president scanella and for um mr shu please uh thank you for your patience and uh if you can just stay with us