Greene County Commissioner Harold Bengsch will not seek reelection when his term ends this year. The 85-year-old has served as commissioner since 2004. Before that, he worked for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department for 45 years. Twenty of those years he was the health department’s director.
In a statement, Springfield Mayor Ken McClure said Bengsch has been “an exemplary public servant and community leader for over six decades” and that he made the Springfield-Greene County Health Department “a premier health agency in the country.”
U.S. Senator Roy Blunt said in a statement that Bengsch’s work as a commissioner “added to his dedicated efforts to improve our local health system, particularly with regard to increasing access to mental and behavioral health care, and will have a long-lasting impact.”