Portland picks former state, Spurwink official as new DHHS director

Portland City Hall (BDN file photo by Troy R. Bennett)

Portland City Hall (BDN file photo by Troy R. Bennett)

The city of Portland announced this afternoon that Acting City Manager Shelia Hill-Christian is recommending Dawn Stiles to take over as the next director of the city’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Stiles will have big shoes to fill if the City Council approves the recommendation. She replaces Douglas Gardner, who left the position in June to take a private sector job in Lewiston. Julie Sullivan, head of the department’s public health division, has been serving as the acting director since Gardner’s departure.

On Twitter @dawncstiles

On Twitter @dawncstiles

The Portland job would represent a quick return to Maine for Stiles, who just last year left the state’s largest mental health agency, Spurwink Services, to take the post of executive director of the Anna Maria Island Community Center in Florida.

Stiles had led Spurwink, an organization with a $55 million annual budget and 1,000 employees, for seven years. Prior to that, she served as a deputy bureau director at the Maine Department of Human Services.

Portland’s DHHS, according to Friday afternoon’s announcement, has a budget of just more than $38 million and has about 400 employees, by comparison. The Portland department oversees the city’s public health division, social services division, the office of elder affairs and the Barron Center, a city-owned long-term care hospital.

The job at Portland’s Department of Health and Human Services is a high-profile one.

In recent years as the economy cratered and demand for space at the city’s homeless shelter and other services skyrocketed, Gardner was under heavy scrutiny and pressure to implement programs to route more people into permanent housing — which, it’s worth noting, he largely did.

The department also went through tumultuous times in 2013-2014 as it lost a long-held federal deal to provide health care services to homeless people through a city-run clinic, as well as a subcontracted state deal to provide in-home parenting education programs in the city. Those losses forced heavy layoffs in the department as the city turned over those duties to other area nonprofits.

city hallPerhaps highest profile of all, the department is in the middle of a legal dispute between the city and LePage administration over whether Portland can distribute general assistance aid benefits to undocumented immigrants, with the governor threatening to cut off state subsidies to cities that do.

If Stiles’ hiring is confirmed by the City Council, which will take the matter up over two hearings on Nov. 3 and 17, respectively, she’ll start work in Portland on Dec. 1, according to Friday’s announcement.

I also never write about a prospective City Hall hiring without noting that, in the last couple of years, there have been a ton of them. Since 2011, the city has hired — or is still looking for a new — city manager, fire chief, police chief, school superintendent, planning director, mayor, deputy city manager, three top attorneys, finance director, communications director, DHHS director and now, city manager again. Add on top of that the decision by three-decade City Councilor and former Mayor Cheryl Leeman not to run for re-election (two-term incumbent John Coyne is also giving up his council seat), and you’ve got a lot of turnover at City Hall in a relatively short period of time.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.