The McCall Memorial Hospital District will assemble a task force to analyze the implications of dissolving a taxing district that provides funding to St. Luke’s McCall.
The district’s board of trustees discussed the topic on Tuesday following 55 written public comments requesting a non-binding dissolution advisory vote on the May 20 ballot.
Andy Laidlaw, who chairs the hospital district board, called the May timeline “ridiculously short” and warned that dissolution could have unforeseen consequences.
“I think this needs consideration, interaction, and research on if the district was to dissolve what are the issues and how do we do it so we don’t just throw a bomb at it and have a mess of pieces floating around,” Laidlaw said.
Ownership of the district’s land and buildings, which contain all of St. Luke’s operations in McCall, would be one of the main facets of dissolution to be resolved.
Still to be decided is who will sit on the dissolution task force, what the group’s goals are, and when an analysis might be completed. The board is expected to discuss those matters at a future meeting.
Grassroots initiative
The campaign for a dissolution advisory vote was sparked by a series of blog posts critical of the district’s collection of about $1.3 million in property taxes each year.
The property taxes, paid by residents in the Donnelly and McCall areas, serve as a subsidy to the operations of St. Luke’s McCall, a private healthcare conglomerate, according to the blog’s author, Tomi Grote of McCall.
Grote told board members on Tuesday that she is “disappointed” that the district will not hold an advisory vote in May, but “delighted” that the conversation has been started.
Among Grote’s concerns is that the taxing district’s boundaries, which roughly mirror the McCall-Donnelly School District, do not reflect the hospital’s service area.
“Taxpayers in the McCall area should not be asked to subsidize a private corporation that serves an area much larger than McCall,” she told Valley Lookout after the meeting.
Public education
Besides the task force, hospital board members urged the need for public education on the value the taxing district provides to taxpayers.
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“We’re here to represent people, but it would appear that a lot of people are misinformed and uneducated on this,” said Angela Staup, a board member. “We can step up to the plate and help educate people in a lot of different ways.”
Trustee Travis Leonard agreed with Staup and suggested a dissolution advisory vote could still be an option after the district complete a public education campaign.
“I just want people to go to the ballot with an educated vote,” Leonard said.
St. Luke’s merger
St. Luke’s took ownership of the hospital’s operations from the McCall Memorial Hospital District in 2010 following a merger vote by trustees. Voters signaled support for the merger in an advisory vote held earlier that year.
Benefits cited by trustees at the time included access to larger financing pools that could improve local health care and operational efficiencies that could be realized through the share of information and skills.
The merger negotiations included a $20 million commitment from St. Luke’s Health System to expand the hospital, Laidlaw said, before adding that plans for the expansion ballooned to $70 million in the following years.
“St. Luke’s, to their credit…committed to the spirit of the endeavor and went forward with giving us the hospital we needed,” he said. “They could have easily said, ‘well, you’ve got the $20 million we pledged, figure out what you want to do with it.’”
District-funded projects
Laidlaw suggested that taxpayer funding from the district helps ensure improvements at St. Luke’s McCall that otherwise may not happen.
“Part of the (health) system is to allocate resources where they are most needed,” he said, referencing other St. Luke’s facilities in the Treasure Valley, Mountain Home, Twin Falls, and Blaine County.
Hospital district-funded projects include remodeling the Allen Nokes building into an urgent care clinic, purchasing an ambulance for transports to Treasure Valley hospitals, and remodeling the orthopedic office to include an X-ray machine.
The district is also helping to fund projects to build an ambulance shelter and hospital workforce housing. Both of those projects are currently in progress.
Hospital history
The McCall Memorial Hospital opened in 1956 as a city-owned hospital that later became a county-owned facility.
In 1984, the hospital district was created by voters in the McCall-Donnelly area to take control of the hospital from the county.
St. Alphonsus Health System managed the hospital on a contract with the district until 1999, when St. Luke’s signed a contract to manage the hospital.
The hospital became known as St. Luke’s McCall in 2010 following the merger with St. Luke’s Health System.
