The Leflore County Board of Supervisors has agreed to put up its half of the approximately $9 million it will take to reportedly complete the proposed takeover of Greenwood Leflore Hospital by University of Mississippi Medical Center.
But the board, in its 4-1 vote Friday, left open the possibility that the commitment could apply to any other medical institution that leased the financially troubled hospital, should the deal with UMMC fall through.
“Now, let’s go get the money,” District 2 Supervisor Reginald Moore said following the vote that was preceded by sometimes tense exchanges with some of the roughly 20 members of the public who attended the meeting.
The county’s action comes two days after the Greenwood City Council agreed to a similar resolution that specified only UMMC as the potential leasing entity.
The Greenwood hospital is jointly owned by the city and county.
District 3 Supervisor Anjuan Brown cast the lone dissenting vote. He explained afterward, though, that he was only objecting to removing UMMC’s name as the lone potential lessee from the document. It commits the county to secure an irrevocable letter of credit or other funding to satisfy its $4.5 million obligation.
Earlier, Brown had seconded the motion made by District 1’s Sam Abraham to approve the resolution, presented to the county by the hospital, without changes. That proposal was defeated 3-2, with Moore, Board President Robert Collins and District 4’s Eric Mitchell opposed.
“I just wanted to make sure that we didn’t do anything to jeopardize the deal with UMMC,” Brown said.
“I felt that the two documents from the city and county should have mirrored each other.”
Abraham said that even though he argued against modifying the resolution, he still voted for the amended version because he wanted to be sure that the lease negotiations stayed on track.
The revised version, Abraham said, “wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t want to leave this board meeting without a commitment that we would fund that $4.5 million if it’s needed.”
When contacted after the meeting, the hospital board’s attorney, Tom Flanagan, said he did not think the change would adversely impact negotiations with UMMC.
“Essentially, they voted to go forward,” he said of the Board of Supervisors’ decision.
Gary Marchand, the hospital’s interim CEO, concurred. “I do not think the form of the county resolution will have any impact other than to provide funding support for a lease transaction,” he responded in an email.
Marchand has said the bailout — which would cover deferred maintenance at the 208-bed hospital and an outstanding liability to the federal Medicare program — was a necessary component of completing a long-term lease by the Jackson-based medical institution.
UMMC was the only bidder that responded this summer to a request for proposals on a long-term lease of the Greenwood hospital.
As the supervisors arrived for the meeting at the courthouse, they were greeted in the board room by a larger than normal crowd of onlookers — a large majority of them women. A quartet of onlookers, dressed in scrubs, were hospital employees who said they wanted the board to save the hospital, their jobs and the community by voting in favor of the resolution.
Collins and Moore both addressed the audience, emphasizing that the board was doing everything it could to keep the hospital from closing but that it was unhappy with the way hospital officials had been negotiating with UMMC. That months-long process stalled this week over UMMC’s demands that $3.5 million be spent on deferred maintenance and that it not be stuck with the Greenwood hospital’s outstanding loan from Medicare.
“We’re going to continue doing everything we can for the hospital and the city of Greenwood,” Collins said. “A lot of people don’t trust the Board of Supervisors, but we’re here to help the community. We’re not going to let you down.”
District 2 Supervisor Reginald Moore holds up the resolution committing the county to providing an estimated $4.5 million to facilitate a proposed lease of Greenwood Leflore Hospital to University of Mississippi Medical Center. The Greenwood City Council passed a similar resolution two days earlier designed to avoid the closure of the financially troubled hospital, which is jointly owned by the city and county. (By Tim Kalich)
Moore added that supervisors are “doing everything we can to keep the doors to our hospital open and to keep our employees working.”
He said previous hold-ups have been due to the hospital not having documentation prepared. “They’ve known about it since the timeline prepared in July and August, so why are we still here in October?” he asked.
Still, while board members debated the wording of the resolution, audience members got testy, fearing that any change to the document would jeopardize the lease.
“They keep saying ‘open for other entities,’ but I don’t think they realize nobody else was interested,” Joelene Rideout, a retired nurse, said of those supervisors who insisted on the amendment.
Mel Harris, a Greenwood Realtor, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the county board not to tinker with the resolution. She said she feared doing anything that might result in the hospital’s closure.
“When I grew up, my mama and daddy owned the theater, and since it closed, people have been saying, ‘We can’t do without a theater.’
“Well, we can do without a theater. We can’t do without a hospital,” she said.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital has been losing money for years and is on the brink of financial collapse. Marchand has said that without further reductions to its operations, the hospital would close by Nov. 30.
Marchand announced this week that the hospital expects to cut additional services and expenses, including job cuts, to try to keep its doors open into January, which now appears to be the earliest in which a lease can be finalized.
Any lease proposal must be approved by both the Greenwood City Council and the county Board of Supervisors. If both sides provide their approval, the agreement would be provided to the state College Board, which has authority over UMMC, for its approval.
The hope was to have the lease ready to present to the College Board at its last meeting of the year on Nov. 17. UMMC notified the hospital on Tuesday that there was now not enough time left to get the complex legal documents finalized for the College Board’s consideration next month.
Since May, the Greenwood hospital has tried to buy time with two rounds of layoffs and the shutdown of several services. The hospital currently has 589 full- and part-time employees, down from almost 800 before the first round of cuts. Another 70 work for Aramark, the private contractor that handles laundry, housekeeping, maintenance and food services at the hospital.
Despite those austerity measures, the hospital lost another $2.4 million in September, the latest month reported. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, total losses have been just under $18 million, even with the help of $9.6 million in coronavirus relief grants, mostly from the federal government.
The hospital has exhausted all of its available reserves and is living on borrowed money in the form of advance Medicare payments it received at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Those payments, however, are a loan that the hospital is having to pay back through deductions in its monthly reimbursements from Medicare. The outstanding balance was $5.6 million as of Sept. 30.
After Friday’s meeting, Collins, the county board’s president, revealed that a consulting firm the county had recently hired, Bose Public Affairs Group of Indianapolis, was working on a strategy to keep the hospital running as an independent operation if negotiations with UMMC collapse or the College Board votes against the takeover.
Collins said the back-up plan would involve scaled-back services, similar to what the hospital has already been implementing.
“We’ve just got to have another plan,” he said.
“That’s why we voted the way we voted today. We want to leave the door open for Plan B.”
He said his preference remains a partnership with state-owned UMMC.
“We would love going with UMMC, we would, because UMMC has got a future here in Greenwood, and we know that the state has got more money than we got.”
- Contact Katherine Parker at 662-581-7239 or kparker@gwcommonwealth.com. Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
Greenwood Realtor Mel Harris, standing, is among a crowd of about 20 that listened to and participated, at times testily, in the Board of Supervisors’ debate. (By Tim Kalich)
