SARASOTA — Every member of the Sarasota County Public Hospital Board went on the record at their meeting this week as opposing any effort to privatize Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
The straw poll was conducted after board member Victor Rohe failed in an effort to get his colleagues to vote on a proposed new standing order requiring a unanimous vote of the nine-member board on any privatization proposal, or any effort to do away with an elected board.
Rohe said his goal was to show the public which board members are for privatization and which are not.
Normally, he would be fine with just a show of hands, he said, but it wouldn’t be binding on future boards.
But Sarasota Memorial chief legal officer Carol Ann Kalish, who also handles the board’s legal affairs, expressed concern about voting on his motion because it wasn’t on the agenda and she hadn’t had time to research the board’s authority to impose that condition on itself.
“I don’t want you guys to do something for show that doesn’t bind the board,” she said.
The board would be stepping onto a “dangerous slope” if it started to do things that would be binding on it without any public notice, she said.
Board chair Sarah Lodge said she’d be more comfortable voting after Kalish could review the proposed standing order, but would be OK with a show of hands.
Rohe said he would go along with that, if it was the most the board was willing to do.
One by one, each board member stated their intent that Sarasota Memorial remain public.
“If the issue is privatization, I am here to say I am opposed to the privatization of this hospital,” board member Tramm Hudson said.
“I’m glad to say I want no change,” board member Brad Baker said.
Board member Sharon Wetzler DePeters said that she and the other incumbents up for reelection have all stated at voter forums that they oppose privatization.
“I absolutely, positively oppose privatization under all circumstances,” Rohe said.
In an interview, he said that the “Medical Freedom” candidates he has recruited to run for the board this year — Tamzin Rosenwasser, Tanya Parus, Mary Flynn O’Neill and Stephen Guffanti — are also against privatization.
The issue first came up in the meeting when Lodge asked the hospital’s CEO David Verinder to address rumors about the hospital’s future.
The board, administration and staff have “vigorously” fought efforts to privatize the hospital, and have worked with Gov. Ron DeSantis to defeat legislation that would have allowed it for all the state’s public hospitals, he said.
The board of Lee Health, in Lee County, voted in June to convert from a government special district to a private nonprofit with an oversight board, but that was under the authority of a limited bill sponsored by the local legislative delegation, he said.
The health system sought the change in large part, officials said, because it’s constrained by a provision in its state charter that precludes it from operating outside the county.
Sarasota Memorial’s charter allows it to operate outside Sarasota County, with the restriction that it can’t use tax revenue raised in the county to do so, Kalish said. Lee Health didn’t have taxing authority.
The hospital’s charter also contains a “poison pill,” she said: It precludes the board from taking any action that would terminate its control of the hospital “unless such action is approved by the electors of Sarasota County at a referendum called for that purpose.”
The requirement would apply regardless of any general law adopted by the Legislature, she said.
Most Popular
Comments / 0