The head of Lincoln County’s largest department is retiring Friday.

Jayne Romero was hired as the county’s health and human services director at the height of the pandemic in 2021 when most employees were working from home.

“When we emerged from the pandemic, we were a divided department with a 30 percent vacancy rate,” Romero said in an exit interview with the Lincoln Chronicle.

The health and human services department now has a staff of 180.

But the cost of living and finding housing is a recruiting challenge in Lincoln County. Often, the department will find good employees who accept a position only to end up giving up the offer when they can’t find housing, Romero said.

There was a lot of work to bring back stability in the department, Romero said, and sometimes there was just a lack of understanding of what different divisions did. To help bridge that gap, she organized department-wide meetings.

Romero previously worked for the human services department in Venango County, in western Pennsylvania and had over 25 years of experience working with health and human services and a background in mental health. She moved to Newport in 2018 with her husband, a psychiatrist at Samaritan Health Services. In 2021, she was hired as the county’s health and human services director.

Under her leadership, the department opened Lincoln County’s only operating low-barrier winter shelter, a feat she credits former commissioner Kaety Jacobsen for pulling together.

“It’s not common for the local government to enter into this type of work,” she said. “Although we weren’t exactly operating at ground zero, health and human services staff have a big heart for disenfranchised people who need that social safety net.”

This past year, 247 people used the winter shelter and forty-two were placed into transitional housing.