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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Just two weeks after the Board of Supervisors fired the county’s Health Services director, it has now taken action to remove the Public Health officer.
Just before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, the board emerged from closed session, at which point Supervisor Jessica Pyska moved to terminate Public Health Officer Dr. Robert Bernstein effective immediately.
Supervisor Bruno Sabatier seconded the motion, which was approved unanimously.
Pyska then moved to appoint Dr. Anju Goel as interim public health officer effective immediately, a motion also seconded by Sabatier and approved by the board in a 5-0 vote.
The action followed the firing of Health Services Director Anthony Arton by just two weeks.
Arton, during his two-year tenure, had recommended the board hire Goel as interim Public Health officer in March 2025, following the resignation of Dr. Noemi Doohan.
Following a closed session at its meeting on June 3, 2025, the board unanimously voted to appoint Bernstein Public Health officer, effective Sept. 2. Goel remained in the job until Bernstein’s arrival.
At the time of his hire, the county hailed Bernstein for his more than 40 years of experience in public health and epidemiology, with a Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University, a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacology at Yale University and a PhD in biochemistry.
He also was a medical consultant for the California Department of Public Health, trained as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Disease Detective” in the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service, worked for the CDC for 23 years and had CDC assignments with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, along with UNICEF and the World Health Organization.
He also held leadership positions with state and county agencies in Florida and California, including rural Butte and Tuolumne counties.
During his seven-month tenure, Bernstein’s most public actions involved the response to the Robin Lane sewage spill emergency that began Jan. 11 in Clearlake due to the rupture of a force main in the county-operated Lake County Sanitation District.
On Jan. 13, Bernstein, Arton and Environmental Health Director Craig Wetherbee went before the Board of Supervisors to present a proclamation declaring the existence of a local emergency for the spill “in order to support the City of Clearlake and enable full Operational Area response and recovery actions.”
All three men appeared at town halls in Clearlake to discuss updates and answer questions from impacted community members.
In a meeting with Lake County News staff on Jan. 16, Bernstein – who along with some of his top staffers took time out from dealing with the spill – shared plans for expanding public health outreach generally. He said at that time that public health doesn’t usually become visible until there is a problem.
A difficult job to fill
On Tuesday, following a daylong open session, the supervisors went into closed session just before 5:40 p.m. with Rasmussen reading off a list of seven items to be discussed, including Bernstein’s evaluation, evaluations of Community Development Director Mireya Turner and interim Public Works Director Lars Ewing, employee dismissal/release, labor negotiations with the Deputy County Counsel Association, conference with legal counsel regarding litigation over the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project and three potential cases of litigation.
A review of board agendas indicated Bernstein’s evaluation was the only one he received from the board during his tenure. That’s a departure from a pattern of the board doing several evaluations in the lead-up to terminating a department head.
When the board returned from closed session at 8:23 p.m., Rasmussen said the evaluation of the interim Public Works director and the Potter Valley Project litigation discussion were put off to a later date.
The board then took the vote to terminate Bernstein and appoint Goel as the interim Public Health officer.
The Public Health officer job – which is required by state law in order to enforce public health orders – has been increasingly difficult to fill for Lake County, even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused even greater challenges filling the position locally, statewide and nationwide.
Since December of 2017, when Dr. Karen Tait retired after nine years on the job, Lake County has had a series of Public Health officers, several of them filling the job on an interim basis.
Altogether, the Public Health officers who have served in that nine year period, including Bernstein, have numbered eight. Dr. Gary Pace, who served during the pandemic, also had previously served two stints as interim before accepting the job in a permanent capacity in October 2019.
At seven months, Bernstein’s isn’t the shortest Public Health officer tenure in Lake County in recent years. Dr. Sara Goldgraben served roughly the same amount of time, from January to August 2018.
Shorter still was the tenure of Dr. Erik McLaughlin, who held the job from March to June of 2022.
Email Elizabeth Larson at elarson@lakeconews.com. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, and on Bluesky, @erlarson.bsky.social. Find Lake County News on the following platforms: Facebook, @LakeCoNews; X, @LakeCoNews; Threads, @lakeconews, and on Bluesky, @lakeconews.bsky.social.
