“Time is of the essence,” nearly every Estes Park Health board member said Thursday night before all officially voted to approve a resolution authorizing EPH senior executives to pursue a final contract turning over management of EPH to UCHealth.
The vote came during the second special meeting of the month held by the EPH board, so the group could specifically consider the resolution and related documents officially acknowledging a pending affiliation between the two medical groups.
Information about the meetings and the documents was released on Tuesday, May 5, two hours before the polls closed, when two new directors were elected to serve on the Park Hospital District Board of Directors.
About 60 people were in the Town Hall board room to witness Thursday’s meeting, and another 22 attended online.
In an open letter published Wednesday and addressed to the board members and the community, incoming board members Tom Leigh and Janet Zeschin called for the EPH board to delay action on the resolution, but board vice chair Drew Webb said delaying the vote “won’t change the facts. Time is of the essence.”
“This is the right time. It’s a good time,” said board member Cory Workman.
Board treasurer Steve Alper agreed with his fellow board members, saying he was proud EPH would be a part of UCHealth. “I might have questions, but it’s best to go through with this right now,” he said.
While indicating his pleasure at the move to join forces with UCHealth, chair David Batey reminded the audience that more work is necessary before the affiliation is final, an action that is anticipated to occur before the end of the year.
“This is not the final step,” he said. “It is an intermediate step,” he said before the vote was taken.
The agreement calls for transferring all EPH activities, employees, clinic operations, and other ancillary medical processes to UCHealth. Essentially, current EPH operations will be eliminated. However, all primary obligations of Park Hospital District will be retained by the district.
Those include ownership of the land and physical buildings owned by the district, and the financial income received from residential property taxes and automobile fees received from the state.
The hard assets will be leased to UCHealth, and financial assets will be turned over to UCHealth for operational expenses and all operations will be managed by UCHealth. The Park Hospital District Board of Directors will assign all money receives from mill levy taxes and other income to UCHealth for those operations. UCHealth has committed to providing PHD with an annual accounting of how Estes Park-derived money has been spent.
Responsibilities of the elected PHD board members are primarily financial and include oversight of and establishing mill levy rates in future years. However, those rates cannot increase or decrease without a vote of the taxpayers within the district, according to EPH attorney David Snow.
Once the affiliation is complete, EPH will be known as UCHealth Estes Valley Medical Center.
UCHealth will create a hospital board to include representation from both the Park Hospital District Board and the community, retain EPH employees, and assume Park Hospital District’s outstanding debt.
Also included in the agreement to affiliate is UCHealth’s post-closing commitment to
- Invest at least $20 million over 10 years for strategic capital and routine maintenance
- Evaluate providing new services for behavioral health, behavioral telehealth, telehealth programs, and pain management
- Maintain the critical access hospital designation currently held by the Estes Park facility
- Continue the operation of the ambulance service
- and provide financial reports to the Estes Park community showing how the tax revenues have been used.
Documents related to Thursday’s action were posted on the EPH website on May 6, and those with questions were invited to submit questions via an online link. Questions are bing consolidated adn will be answered online. Questions related to the Estes Park Health Foundation or Salud should be directed to those organization and not EP Health.