Kevin Hines, the newly elected chair of the Republican-dominated Orange County Legislature, has moved to reintroduce bipartisanship in top committee positions.
Hines, a Republican, named Democrats Laurie Tautel and Genesis Ramos as chairs of the Health and Mental Health Committee and the Human Services Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers presided over their first meetings in late January.
“That is a big, bold move by Chairman Hines,” Tautel told The Epoch Times. She said she believes it shows great foresight for him to “look at the qualifications of individuals instead of party lines.”
A lawmaker for the town of Highlands, Tautel said she has accumulated extensive knowledge about the health care system by working at doctors’ offices and taking care of sick family members, including her mother, who has undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from diabetes; one brother with Parkinson’s disease; and another developmentally disabled brother with mental health issues.
Tautel has served as a member of the Health and Mental Health Committee since 2018.
As the new chair, she said she hopes to work with department heads to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health, expand county-supported clinics beyond urban centers to rural areas, collect data to understand the turnover of health care providers in the county, and drive up the occupancy at county-owned nursing home Valley View.
“When it comes to local government, I really believe bipartisanship is important because we are talking about kitchen table, bread and butter, everyday quality of life issues,” Newburgh lawmaker Ramos told The Epoch Times.
Ramos, who grew up with immigrant and working-class parents who labored hard to provide for the family, said she always had a desire to help people and went to study human services in college before earning a master’s degree in public administration.
Much of her professional experience thus far has involved administrative roles at nonprofits, including a stint as the executive director of a new center at Mount Saint Mary College that offers educational workshops and well-being programs to Newburgh residents.
“One of the things I am most committed to as chair is to maintain open lines of communication with our department heads and let them know that they have a partner and someone that will advocate for all the good initiatives and programs that they recognize,” Ramos said.
She said she hopes to identify housing solutions through a new task force that reports to her committee, work with department heads on funding solutions in the face of potential cuts in federally supported welfare programs, and address staffing shortages in certain units.
“I just put the people in that I thought would be best for those positions,” Hines told The Epoch Times. “The whole reason for me coming into office was to try to be more transparent and try to get opinions from everybody, regardless of political parties.”
Beyond two Democrat chairs, Hines noted that he named a historic number of female lawmakers—four to be exact—to head statutory committees this year.
Aside from Tautel and Ramos, Kathy Stegenga and Janet Sutherland chair the Public Safety and Emergency Services Committee and the Rules, Enactments, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, respectively.
Chairs for the rest of the eight statutory legislative committees remain the same, except for the Ways and Means Committee, where Glenn Ehlers replaced Leigh Benton, who had recently been elected to be the Republican majority leader.
