By By BETTY MITCHELL GRAY
betty@wdnweb.com
Contributing Writer
The future of health care in Beaufort County is back in the hands of the Beaufort Regional Health System’s Board of Commissioners, it was announced Wednesday.
It will be up to the BRHS board to make a new recommendation on the future of BRHS to the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners following Tuesday’s announcement by Community Health Systems that it had withdrawn its offer of a 30-year lease.
“The next step is in the hands of the (hospital) authority board,” said Jerry Langley, chairman of the county commissioners, after that board emerged from a 90-minute, closed-door meeting with its lawyers Wednesday afternoon.
About 35 people attended the county commissioners’ meeting at Beaufort County Community College to learn the next step in the debate over who will provide health care in the community.
“We do have a process to finish, and we will finish that process,” Langley told the crowd.
The BRHS board is expected to meet next week to discuss its next move, Langley said, although no meeting had been scheduled by deadline for today’s edition of the Washington Daily News.
In an interview after the meeting, Langley said that he hopes a new decision by the BRHS board will be made soon in order to ease the minds of hospital employees and the public.
“It is my sincere prayer that this happen fairly quickly,” he said.
The BRHS board voted 5-4 on Jan. 3 to recommend that the county commissioners accept the offer from CHS. Four of the board members said in discussion during that meeting that they preferred an offer submitted by Greenville-based University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina.
On Tuesday, CHS announced in a letter to County Manager Paul Spruill and BRHS Board Chairwoman Alice Mills Sadler that it had withdrawn its offer to lease the local health system for $30 million.
That letter cited public opinion against CHS and pending legal action against the county commissioners and the BRHS board as contributing to the company’s decision to withdraw its offer.
That move halted plans by the commissioners on Wednesday to review the Franklin, Tenn.-based health-care system’s proposal.
Instead, the commissioners met in a closed-door session to discuss with their lawyers the pending legal action brought against the commissioners and the BRHS board and talk about the commissioners’ role in the health-care debate given the withdrawal of the CHS offer, according to Spruill.
On Monday, an injunction against the panel was granted by Superior Court Judge Walter H. Godwin Jr.
A motion filed by lawyers for James and Phyllis Boyd seeking the injunction asserts that the county commissioners violated the state’s open-meetings laws when its members held a closed-door session Jan. 7.
It maintains that the attorney-client exception cited for the 90-minute session should not have been invoked because the commissioners, instead, discussed “general policy matters” which are not covered by an exemption from the law.
The motion also asserts that the withdrawal of CHS from the negotiations prior to the Oct. 27 public hearing held by the BRHS board prevented the public from adequately commenting on the CHS offer. CHS announced it was withdrawing from negotiations hours before the public hearing was held, but it returned to the table about a week later, apparently after being contacted by some local officials.
If the Boyds continue the legal action, it would allow their lawyers to take depositions and subpoena records related to that return of CHS to the negotiations, according to some legal experts.
The motion also contends that state law was circumvented by the failure of the BRHS board and the county commissioners to adequately address the needs of “underserved groups such as low-income persons, racial and ethnic minorities, and handicapped persons” in the deliberations of the affiliation offers.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mark D. Stewart, a lawyer representing the Boyds, told the Daily News that his clients were waiting for the outcome of the county commissioners meeting to decide whether to continue with the legal action.