Published on August 6, 2020 in the Mangum Star
Two hospital board seats are still yet to be filled.
Last month, the Mangum Regional Medical Center’s board of trustees nominated Carson VanZant to fill a vacant seat on the board, but the Mangum city commissioners took no action on the appointment in their special July 9 meeting.
Zac Zachary will be off the hospital board soon, so there will be two vacancies on the board.
Mangum city manager Dave Andren requested the commissioners table the appointment because he and city attorney Cory Kendall made a plan for the vacant seat to be filled with a town board member from Granite.
He said they wanted to provide Granite a seat at the table since it is a regional hospital.
That was pretty much all the discussion the commissioners needed to say they would take no action on the appointment.
Commissioner Ronnie Webb asked when the seats would need to be filled.
Kendall said it was complicated since Zachary was leaving the board soon.
“We’re having trouble finding bodies to serve,” Kendall said. “So we’re going to recommend amending the trust indenture and bylaws to, instead of assigning individuals or appointing positions, certain entities would have the ability to appoint.”
After that, the board moved on to the next agenda item.
Last Thursday at the hospital authority’s July 30 meeting, Kendall presented this proposal to the hospital board, which was met with mixed reactions and a no action result as well, further delaying the filling of the vacant seats.
At the hospital meeting, Kendall said this would help Mangum and Granite have more say in the direction and control of the hospital.
He said it would also take some burden off the actual hospital authority, who have to appoint new board members every time a seat becomes vacant.
In this new plan, one hospital board seat would go to a Mangum city commissioner and one to a Granite town board member.
Kendall said this would help with transparency as well because information from the meeting could be relayed back to the municipalities.
There would still be a county representative and it wouldn’t affect the other board seats.
Hospital authority board member Cheryl Lively asked Kendall about a previous time they discussed a city council member on the board.
She said last time they talked about it, it was determined to be a conflict of interest, and she wondered what had changed since then.
Kendall said it wasn’t a conflict of interest, “I never used the phrase ‘conflict of interest.’ It was an indemnity thing.”
He said it was to create a wall of separation from the city and the hospital authority.
But, he said it was getting hard to get people to serve on the hospital board.
Hospital authority board member Ilka Heiskell brought the fact that they did have someone who was willing to fill the vacant seat when they voted to recommend VanZant to the seat.
Kendall said the city did not approve the recommendation at their meeting.
“Okay, but that was also under your advisement,” Lively said about the no action.
She said she watched the meeting and saw that Kendall and Andren started the discussion by asking the commissioners to table the appointment.
She asked Andren if they knew all the information from the appointment or if they just acted on Andren and Kendall’s request.
“It was pretty troubling for me to sit here and watch that,” Lively said about the July 9 city commission meeting. “It talked about parliamentary procedure problems. I see no more problems in what we do here than any other city council meeting, so at some point if y’all want to kind of clarify what you meant by that. It’s not ‘warm bodies’ being placed on (the hospital authority). I don’t feel like I’m a warm body and I certainly hope that’s not how I’m viewed.”
Andren, who had previously just been sitting in the background on the hospital authority meeting, joined in the discussion.
Andren reinforced the idea of having a city commissioner on the board to relay information back to the City of Mangum.
Hospital authority board member Zac Zachary said he understood Lively’s concerns, but he agreed with Andren’s idea.
He said it would bring another community in our county into the discussion, and hopefully they’d be more willing to use the facility.
“If we don’t have communities in this county come in, this is something we may not have the luxury of having in a few years,” Zachary said.
Lively asked if there was a tax structure set up for Mangum to pay toward the hospital.
Kendall said the city receives no public revenue from the hospital.
It’s completely self-sufficient.
Lively said in 2004, Granite did not want any part of the hospital because they did not want to have to pay taxes.
Kendall said the bond, which was to pay back hospital debt and what Lively was talking about, has been fully paid back, so no public money goes into the hospital anymore.
“So now (Granite) would love to jump on board so they don’t have to pay anything,” Lively said. “Gotcha.”
Kendall said this is just to get the discussion going, and if they said no to the proposal, they’d just move on.
“No action,” Lively said.
And, no other board member made a motion, so the proposal did not pass, and the board seats are still left up to the hospital authority to fill.