Hospital board should defer approving affiliation until new board is sworn in

Yesterday, the Park Hospital District scheduled two special board meetings to consider agreements establishing Estes Park Health’s much-delayed affiliation with UC Health—one for May 8 and a second for May 15. 

The announcement suggests that the board will vote on approving the agreements at the May 15 meeting.

This timing appears to be designed to prevent the newly elected board members of the Park Hospital District – Tom Leigh and Janet Zeschin – from weighing in on the terms of the affiliation. 

The new board members will not be sworn in until May 28, thus allowing the current lame duck board to make the decision regarding the affiliation without input from the new board members.

This timing is also a continuation of the board’s efforts to avoid transparency about the terms of the affiliation. The Estes Valley Voice has made Colorado Open Records Act requests on three separate occasions for the letter of intent between the parties executed last October, and disclosure has been refused each time. 

Following the latest request, on March 20, 2025, the Estes Valley Voice filed suit to require disclosure of the letter of intent under the CORA. 

Attorneys for the Park Hospital District have succeeded in delaying the hearing on the litigation until May 22 and no doubt will attempt to assert that the pending litigation is now moot.

However, the community needs to know what was included in the letter of intent and what has been incorporated into the final agreement.

As we have feared, the Park Hospital District board of directors has accelerated the negotiation process to avoid disclosing the letter of intent and to minimize the public’s ability to review and comment on what is sure to be a complex and possibly controversial agreement. 

It is unclear whether the entire agreement will be made available to the public, or only a management-prepared summary, as was done with the earlier letter of intent.

The community will rightly have many questions about the affiliation.

What control over operations will the Park Hospital District have?

To what extent will the Park Hospital District be able to hold UCHealth accountable for compliance with the terms of the affiliation agreement and operations issues that arise in the management of the hospital?

What commitments, if any, will UCHealth be making about the continuance of services at the hospital? Will it remain open as a 24-hour critical access hospital or be changed to a 23-hour observation hospital? 

Last summer, the Estes Valley Voice asked the EPH communications manager about the average daily census in the hospital. We were told it was 4.1 patients. That raises questions about the economies of scale of running this hospital. Will Estes Park Health continue to be operated as a 24-hour hospital or become a doctor’s office and outpatient clinic with an emergency room where patients are sent down valley if they need more than 23 hours of care?

Many small hospitals are turning to that model. Will this be the future of Estes Park Health, supported for 50 years by local property taxpayers?

The current Park Hospital District chair has indicated that the only duties of the Park Hospital District board post-affiliation will be to set the property tax mill levy for the district. 

Certainly, the community is more interested in what happens with the hospital than in leaving the approval of all the details to a lame duck board. 

Two weeks ago, at the April board meeting and before yesterday’s election for new board directors, the public was told to expect the merger or affiliation to happen in late 2025 or early next year.

It appears that the current board’s schedule is a blatant attempt to exclude the electorate from any meaningful commentary about the affiliation agreement.

The Park Hospital District board has not operated with transparency and accountability on many levels. Last fall, they issued a one-page budget of $64 million before adoption.

To inspect the budget, the public had to make an appointment to go to the hospital during business hours.

One Estes Valley Voice editorial board member went to the hospital to review the budget and was told they needed to make an appointment. It was like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when the doorman tells Dorothy to go away and come back tomorrow.

Two editors from the Estes Valley Voice made an appointment to review the budget. When they arrived, they were handed the one-page budget and told they could not make a copy.

When they asked to see the detailed schedules for the line items of the $64 million budget, the CEO told them the information was unavailable.

The Estes Valley Voice had to submit a CORA request to get a copy of the one-page $64 million budget to share with the Estes Valley community.

As the community began to rumble and raise hard questions at public board meetings about how employee complaints about a toxic work culture in the hospital and how the board was operating, the board decided to hold meetings virtually, stifling community involvement.

This is in addition to the board conducting more than 200 closed-door executive session meetings over the past two years.  

Two hundred executive session meetings are nothing short of an outrageous end run around the state’s open meetings laws, which require that government institutions operate with transparency and accountability to the people. The public’s business must be done publicly, and EP Health is not a private business.

As currently structured, the community will have only one week to review and comment on a likely complicated affiliation of great importance. Little detail about the affiliation has been provided to date. This shows a total lack of respect for the people of the Estes Valley.

Moreover, the current board appears unwilling to grant the respect deserved to the new hospital board to weigh in on the terms of the affiliation before it is approved. 

The current Park Hospital District board of directors should defer approving the affiliation agreements until the new board is sworn in.