Developer proposes new version of private hospital

When Tim Miller retires to Sonoma, he wants to be sure the valley still has a hospital.
So the Indiana developer is offering to build one.
“I’m dead serious about it,” said Miller, who hopes to outline his proposal at the June 20 meeting of the Sonoma Valley Hospital board.
“I’ve built about 1,000 healthcare facilities around the country,” said Miller, whose company is called Solutions, Inc.
Those healthcare facilities include medical-imaging centers, sleep centers and surgery centers, he said, as well as the 32-bed, 70,000-square-foot California Heart and Surgical Hospital in Loma Linda.
What Miller has in mind for the Sonoma Valley isn’t completely fleshed out, yet.
A recent voter-attitude survey of city of Sonoma residents commissioned by Don Sebastiani found that 57 percent thought that a new Sonoma Valley Hospital should be a non-profit facility funded by taxpayers, while only 26 percent said the new hospital should be privately funded.
But Miller couldn’t say what the public/private ownership structure would be; his attorneys are still figuring that out.
“It’s not that I’m trying to be evasive with you; it’s a pretty complex structure,” Miller said.
“I think what’s critical for Sonoma (is) you have to have physician ownership in this. In order to be attractive to physicians, you have to have their involvement,” Miller said.
As for the controversial question of the new hospital’s location, Miller said, “To us, the site… needs to be selected by the community and we could work with whatever.”
Miller has been in contact with board member Bill Boerum and Carl Gerlach, the hospital’s chief executive officer.
Gerlach said he’s interested in hearing Miller’s proposal.
“I want to vet them,” Gerlach said. “I remain skeptical. What do they say? Trust, but verify.”
As for opposition that the survey showed to a privately funded hospital, Gerlach responded, “When people say, ‘I don’t like the idea of a corporate hospital.’ I’m not sure they… understand that there’s a range of corporateness.”
Public/private partnerships can be structured in a variety of ways, he said.
In related news, Gerlach said that one of the tasks on his business plan is to hire a consultant to doublecheck the state’s seismic safety rating for the hospital’s west wing, which has the most patient rooms.
Hospital board member Mike Smith told the Sun that it might be possible to get the state to extend the west wing’s usable life to 2030, reducing the urgency to build a new facility.
Gerlach said, “We need to hire somebody to get clear on the seismic status of the West Wing.”
Gerlach also said that hospital officials aren’t ruling out a proposal to build a new hospital on a Harris Road vineyard that includes a historic house, just to the south of the Leveroni family’s hayfield on Fifth Street West that the hospital board suggested as a site to build a new hospital —until controversy over the use of eminent domain ruled out the Leveroni site.
“The Harris Street site (has) got to stay in play until we pick one of the options,” Gerlach said.
Miller made a pitch once before to build a hospital in Sonoma. He said that about 3-and-a-half years ago, local physicians asked him to come to Sonoma.
“They were concerned that the hospital was going away,” Miller said.
But Miller said his proposal wasn’t well-received by the board at that time or by former CEO Robert Kowal.
“It was pretty obvious that the hospital board wasn’t interested, Miller said. “We kind of exited, stage right.”