Larry Meredith, who started work as Marin County’s director of Health and Human Services the day before 9/11, will retire at the end of this month after more than 13 years on the job.

“I’m in a good place in terms of my health; I’m 74 years old. I want this next chapter to be available to me while I have energy,” said Meredith, who before he had both his knees replaced in September was still playing in two hockey leagues. He lost his two front teeth to an errant hockey stick in 2013. He grew up in a farming community in Canada.

“The plan is to get back to skiing and hockey,” Meredith said, “although that is not something my orthopedic surgeon wants to hear.”

Meredith oversees a department with a yearly budget of $160 million and about 700 employees. For five years running now Marin has been ranked the healthiest county in California by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“He is really a public health professional through and through,” said Thomas Peters, president of the Marin Community Foundation. “He has offered a strong voice over the years for the context of health. It’s not just a matter of caring for people who are ill but asking the broader question: how do we support people to build and maintain their own good health?”

After earning a degree in business administration from the University of Western Ontario and his master’s and doctorate degrees in psychology from Penn State University, Meredith worked for the San Francisco Department of Public Health for 30 years before coming to Marin. Meredith and Peters were co-workers in San Francisco for about 17 years, and now they and their staffs often coordinate their efforts for maximum impact.

“I’ve known him his whole career,” Peters said. “He’s a heck of a nice guy.”

Health campus

One of Meredith’s signature achievements in 2009 was the opening of the county’s Health and Wellness Campus in San Rafael, which houses the Marin Community Clinic and other county health services.

Former supervisor Susan Adams, who worked with Meredith on the $62 million project, said that Meredith looks beyond Marin’s high health rankings, which are due in part to the county’s affluence.

“He didn’t lose sight of the people in our county who did not fit into that higher quality of life and was always striving to level the playing field,” Adams said. “His vision, his experience and his passion will be greatly missed by the county.”

Linda Tavasi, executive director of Marin Community Clinics, said, “I treasure our working relationship, and I’m going to miss him. He’s a great leader.”

Restructuring

If you ask Meredith what he thinks his signature achievements are, the first thing he mentions is setting in motion an organizational culture quite different from the one he inherited.

“I think we’re more and more together as an organization and less siloed, less divided by organizational culture,” Meredith said.

Some of that reorganization came out of a necessity to do more with fewer employees.

“Coming out of the recession,” Meredith said, “we scaled down where we were not hiring key positions so we could put our resources into the safety net where people were hurting.”

Heather Ravani, Marin County’s assistant director of Health and Human Services and one of the candidates to replace Meredith, said, “Larry’s presence has been felt through good times and bad. He has led us here at HHS through ongoing restructuring and integration of programs. He has always supported and encouraged creative programs and innovative approaches.”

Housing hot button

What does Meredith think are Marin County’s biggest health challenges?

“Of all the issues, housing is the hot button issue,” Meredith said.

The booming high-tech economy in San Francisco has sent housing costs through the roof.

“The fact is they’re driving people on fixed incomes out of Marin,” Meredith said. “Marin is becoming an economically gated community by virtue of the fact that there are insufficient rental properties.”

Following a national trend, Marin has moved to a “housing first” model that stresses getting homeless individuals into permanent housing, but Meredith said the county is challenged to find sufficient housing stock.

And Meredith is also concerned that the county is ill prepared for the rapid aging of the county’s residents. But characteristically, he views the necessary adjustments optimistically.

“I don’t see it as a silver tsunami,” Meredith said. “I see this as a wave that we have to surf into age-friendly communities.”