Hospital on life support

April 1, 2014

It looks like the chickens are coming home to roost at the children’s hospital and the people involved are blaming each other.

The children’s hospital is not making money, contrary to what we were told when we voted to fund it.  The way their contract with the county hospital works the shortfall will actually have to be made up with county taxpayer funds.

We were told that no county money (other than the bond money to build the facility) would be needed.  Of course that was not true.  Children’s hospitals generally do not make money.  They are funded through donations from the public and, in cases like ours, taxpayer money.

Please don’t think that I am against having facilities that care for children.  Some would argue that private hospitals can do that job.  That is not the point that I am trying to make.  We have the new facility, it is losing money, we need to decide how to handle it.

Deceit

It seems obvious that in our current situation taxpayer money is being used.  The voters were not told the truth when the election was at hand.  Maybe the voters would have decided that we needed the hospital even if it operated at a loss.  Maybe not, but the voters certainly were not given an opportunity to decide based on reality.

The head of the county hospital was given $152 million to build three clinics and remodel part of the old building last year.  Now he is openly talking about “re-purposing” the money.

Both hospital chiefs are under the spotlight at this point.

Don’t be surprised if they both leave.  Then don’t be surprised if our current county judge tries to take one of those well paying jobs.

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

More ball park parking issues

March 25, 2014

The news broke last week that our new baseball team is considering an agreement with the county to lease 600 of the 800 parking spaces in our county parking garage for use by the ball park’s game day employees.

Some reports indicated that the parking spaces were wanted for game days, while others led us to believe that they were wanted only after hours and on Saturday game days.

Bankruptcy

Granted that I know little about operating a ball park, I am hard pressed to believe that the team will employ 600 extra employees for each game.  With ball park capacity somewhere around 9,000 that would mean that they had one extra employee (beyond the full time employees) for every 15 spectators.

If that is the case then either the per spectator income will have to be very high or the ball team will not make a profit.

More likely to me is that the team may want 600 spaces so that they can resell them to spectators, presumably at a profit.

Citizen inconvenience

Leasing the county spaces to the team could lead to significant inconvenience to those that need to go to the county building.  If that happens I suspect the the public outcry will be significant.

County staff evidently called a meeting to discuss the situation.  The baseball team officials did not show up.

Draw your own conclusions as to why.  Are they not used to doing business in public, or are they having second thoughts about what might happen?

We deserve better

Brutus

 

19 Comments | Ball park, County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Another two step

March 17, 2014

Remember the $152 million that our county commissioners authorized the county hospital to spend for new outpatient facilities and partial remodeling of our county hospital?

Changing plans

Now that the county hospital has the money, they want to change how and where they spend it.

The February 25, 2014 minutes of their board of managers meeting shows the hospital chief executive explaining to his board that the money needs to be “reprioritized”.  From the minutes:

Mr.  Valenti noted that after discussions with the design team they had come up with the following:

1)  To implement what was discussed, however it would not be advisable because is not the integrations that everyone wants.

2)  To reprioritize the $152M similar to how they have reprioritized the Annex and the Central plant based on patient needs.  He added that within the next 45 to 60 days management must take the $152M and reprioritize.  They need to slim down the ancilliaries, keep pharmacy robust, expand office visits, may decrease the footprint and look at contingencies to look towards an enterprise solution.

Translation

Now that we have the money let’s figure out how to spend it.  Forget what we told the commissioners.

Reprioritize

I’ve got another idea.  Since everyone is supposed to have health care coverage now why don’t we reprioritize and shut down the county hospital?

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Bipartisanship

March 8, 2014

This made its way to me through a friend:

M. Stanton Evans, Texas author, educator, and journalist observed that in America there are only two parties, 

“One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party…Occasionally the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid.   That’s called bipartisanship.”

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government, County Government, Federal Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Something getting better

March 7, 2014

The Times reported yesterday  that the Ysleta Independent School District board has voted to:

“… provide all back up materials for board meetings available to the public on the district’s website.”

Hopefully this material will be posted along with the board agenda so that members of the public can be better informed before board meetings.

Both this blog and the Times have made this request.  Thankfully the board listened.

The El Paso Community College and the county hospital boards do not post the backup material.  I hope that others will join in asking them to do so.

The city has done a pretty good job of posting most of the material.  Once in a while we see agenda items with missing, skimpy, or misleading material.  Unfortunately the city has chosen to remove the ability to electronically search city council agendas before 2014.  We sent a copy of a blog article about this to the mayor’s email address but have not gotten them to change this policy.

A reader of this blog sent in this comment that has been helpful:

woodyco says:
February 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM  (Edit)

You can always use the city’s google search to look em up

just go to the city site, go to the google search

add the following:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING”
then a search term afterwards
Or you can use +”Special City Council Meeting”

if you don’t want the pdf’s, just add -pdf.

example:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING” alcohol -.pdf

He’s an example of their agenda’s that is “not searchable”

http://imgur.com/AAnfRiK

Let’s do what we can to get our local government agencies to be more transparent.

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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