Columnist Jeff German: County asleep as UMC bleeds

Friday, Nov. 8, 2002 | 3:41 a.m.

IF YOU'RE looking for Clark County to build its $5.3 million child welfare offices this year, don't count on it.

The county fire department will have a tough time getting the $4 million it needs for new trucks and equipment.

And there probably won't be $3 million available for improvements at the aging Sunset Park.

Why, you ask?

Because your county commissioners, who've been asleep at the switch again, have been forced to spend the money normally earmarked for these things on the struggling University Medical Center.

The commissioners learned last week, much to their dismay, that UMC needs a whopping $37 million bailout to keep its doors open.

It's going to be the largest infusion of cash ever requested by the public hospital, which claims to be having a hard time paying its bills because of an increase in patients with no insurance.

It's hard to believe that the commissioners, who until last week directly oversaw UMC, could not have foreseen this management disaster.

More than 200 county projects and items eligible to receive money from a special capital projects (rainy day) fund now are on hold.

On the smaller side, the district attorney's office will have to find another way to pay for $116,000 in new office furniture.

The county treasurer's office also will have to wait for its $50,000 bulletproof front counter, and there probably won't be money available for three new metal detectors at District Court.

And the $14,000 for the high-speed fax machines for Las Vegas justices of the peace? Forget about it.

The commissioners themselves may not get $59,535 in camera upgrades at the commission chambers to show their smiling faces more clearly on television.

What makes the UMC mess more troubling is that this is the second year in a row the county has had to dip into its annual reserve fund to cover bad management decisions made under its nose. Last year $33 million went to cover cost overruns at the much-delayed Regional Justice Center construction project.

Unlike the Regional Justice Center, which was placed under the watchful eye of the county manager's office, UMC answered directly to the seven commissioners.

So there's really no excuse for the elected officials not to have seen this coming.

The warning signs were everywhere -- the rise in indigent patient care after Sept. 11, 2001, the well-publicized crisis over medical malpractice insurance, the brief closure of UMC's prized trauma center and the shortage of registered nurses.

It's also no secret that public hospitals across the country have long struggled to turn a profit.

In 1994, when Bill Hale took over as UMC's chief executive, the commissioners poured $17 million into the hospital to keep it afloat. So there's even a history of financial trouble at UMC.

Hale, it turns out, doesn't come out of this cleanly, either.

He insists he told the commissioners about the $37 million deficit as soon as he found out.

"It's a very large number, but the reality is when I learned about it, I told them about it," he says.

But Hale neglected to tell the commissioners on a consistent basis about the downward economic trends facing UMC. He never talked about cost-cutting measures, and he never brought commissioners a plan of action to combat the cash flow problems at the hospital until he came to them after it was deeply in the red.

No wonder commissioners decided last week to put UMC under the authority of County Manager Thom Reilly.

What's Reilly's first order of business?

"We want to stop the bleeding now and get as many controls as possible in place," he says.

That's great. But your county commissioners should have stopped the bleeding at UMC months ago.

It would have saved money to spend on other things.