Hospital board makes site selection amidst questions

They put the best face on it that they could, but the hospital board had a difficult time moving forward at its 3-hour special meeting Wednesday evening. Four of the five board members of the Sonoma Valley Health Care District were openly anxious not just to choose a site for a new hospital, but to choose the “in-town” site, configured in its most recent incarnation as the site of the current hospital plus the three parking lots plus the Carinelli (formerly Cuneo) property, totaling about 10.2 acres.
The hospital board and staff identified for comparison purposes a proposal by Barry Swenson Builder, a property developer, for 7.5 acres on Broadway, inside the Urban Growth Boundary. While the board members refused repeated requests to say how much either proposal would cost to construct, the summary of the presentation by hospital CEO Carl Gerlach gave the difference in their costs: Broadway would cost $20 million more to construct, due to its underground parking and longer construction time, and would cost $3 million more to run each year, due to the need to lease medical office space that the developer would build and own.
Mr. Mike Black, a development manager with Swenson, strenuously objected to those characterizations, saying that no one on their team had ever seen those numbers, that they had never proposed underground parking, and that construction at the Broadway site should be much cheaper, not more expensive. Board chairman Dick Kirk cut Black off from further explanation, though the local Mr. Bennett Martin, also representing Swenson, did speak later, saying that they’d like an opportunity to review with the board the nature ?of their proposal and why they believed the figures would show it to be the superior alternative. Black said afterward, “This is about doing what’s right for the community, and the hospital board just made a several hundred million dollar decision on a whim.”
Mr. Mike Nugent had seemed to agree. He was the one board member who wanted time to study the extensive materials he said the board members had been given only the night before and even earlier that day. With a closed session running from 1 p.m. to an hour before the public meeting, the hospital’s presentation materials had been developed, according to several sources, during the dinner break.
Board member Mike Smith took Nugent to task, saying he’d heard Nugent say the same thing before, asking for more time to make decisions. Nugent drew laughs by asking for credit for his consistency, at least, but he argued that more time was entirely appropriate, in light of the size and consequence of the decision facing them. Chairman Kirk, citing his own exhaustion and stress, supported Nugent’s motion to postpone a vote until the assumptions for the Broadway proposal could be reviewed with the developer, but that was defeated by a 3-2 vote.
The motion to approve the in-town site for the new hospital was approved 4-0-1, with Nugent pledging his support for the majority decision but abstaining for the reasons he’d given. The issue of public trust was raised by several speakers, including Chairman Kirk, who called it “the elephant in the room.” He wanted the public perception to be that the board had used a “thorough, fact-based” process to make its decision.