At its Sept. 7 special meeting, Park Hospital District directors again clashed over mounting legal bills and how to address them.
Treasurer Brigitte Foust called the special District a cash cow for its law firm, Hall Render, and Director Tom Leigh again questioned legal expenses, which have exceeded $200,000 since the beginning of the year — more than four times the $50,000 budgeted for legal services.
Directors acknowledged that they did not adequately supervise the work for which they were billed. Yet rather than closely examining who authorized the work, whether it was necessary, or whether the charges were reasonable, the board approved payment.
Allowing legal expenses to exceed the budget by such a wide margin without sufficient authorization or oversight represents a failure of the directors’ fiduciary responsibility to District taxpayers.
Directors Stephen Alper and Janet Zeschin also suggested that paying the bills would not cost taxpayers anything because the payments would merely reduce the amount UCHealth retains from the money the Park Hospital District must transfer to UCHealth under the affiliation agreement.
That is tone deaf and cavalier. The District’s annual revenue of about $4.6 million comes directly from property taxes collected through its mill levy.
Whether the money remains with the District or transfers to UCHealth, it began as taxpayer money and should be respected as such. The directors have failed to do that.
Those dollars could otherwise support hospital services for District residents. Instead, a significant portion of taxpayer money is going to pay a law firm.
Invoices in the Sept. 7 special board meeting packet show that, since Dec. 1, the Park Hospital District has incurred about $46,000 in legal fees related to an Estes Valley Voice Colorado Open Records Act request seeking details of the District’s legal spending. The request followed an earlier CORA request over the letter of intent in the UCHealth acquisition deal.
The District denied the Voice’s requests for that letter three times before releasing it and then the District’s attorney told the Court that “we could not prove that, (sic) that the denial was proper.”
In other words, the District’s lawyer effectively said the Park Hospital’s denial of the letter of intent was indefensible. The Park Hospital District agreed to pay the Estes Valley Voice’s legal fees in bringing the matter before the Court.
In an interesting twist, the Estes Valley Voice’s lawyer told the Park Hospital District that he would waive his legal fees if the District told the community how much taxpayer money it spent to defend the indefensible in the first place.
The offer was refused.
Without the Directors ever discussing this matter at a public board meeting and taking a public vote, the District refused the offer. Public bodies, including special hospital districts, must make decisions in public. That did not happen.
The Estes Valley Voice then filed a CORA request to find out how much taxpayer money the Park Hospital District Board spent to fight the initial CORA request for the letter of intent.
Memos, however, in the Sept. 7 board packet show that the Park Hospital District has incurred about $46,000 in legal fees since Dec. 1 fighting the Estes Valley Voice’s Colorado Open Records Act requests concerning the District’s legal expenses. That is in addition to paying the Estes Valley Voice’s attorney’s fees in the first CORA case.
The board packet for the Sept. 7 meeting disclosed detailed legal expenses by category, even though the Estes Valley Voice was initially told the Park Hospital District did not have itemized bills from its lawyers, only aggregated bills.
Then the EVV was told the District had itemized legal bills, but it would not provide the invoices per the CORA request because the bills contained privileged information that could not be redacted.
The requested billing information is public and not privileged, as shown in the contents of the Sept. 7 board packet, yet the board continues to oppose disclosure of how much it originally spent on legal fees to withhold the letter of intent in pending litigation.
After failing to oversee its legal spending adequately, the board has continued to spend even more public money to obstruct public scrutiny of its spending.
We have said it before, and we will say it again: the public’s business must be done publicly.
The Park Hospital District will meet for its regularly scheduled monthly meeting tonight at 5:30 p.m. in the Town Hall Board Room, 170 MacGregor Ave. Taxpayers should show up and demand accountability from the elected Directors about their money.
The board packet for tonight’s meeting and information about joining the meeting remotely via Microsoft Teams are available online.
the Park District Board is supposed to oversea the District’s management and budget. But the agreement with UCHealth gives them no power to do that. It is a violation of law, and we are paying a firm $500 an hour to ignore that, and eat up every small penny left to the District. Almost 6 months pay given to employees who were fired, with no Board approval. High level execs drink at lunch time. This is outrageous. Agree the health care is probably good, but wasting tax money is not.