Erlanger And Lessons Learned

The Chattanooga-Hamilton County Hospital Authority Board of Trustees meets and discusses bonuses for management.
The Chattanooga-Hamilton County Hospital Authority Board of Trustees meets and discusses bonuses for management.

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Erlanger board approves management incentives

Though it might have been more circumspect for Erlanger hospital authority board members to wait until the end of the fiscal year before offering $1.7 million in bonuses in the first place, the trustees at least tried to dot their i's and cross their t's before having a re-vote on the bonuses they agreed to pay in December.

That re-vote was last night, and, in truth, was a bit of window dressing since the bonuses were widely expected to be approved again and because half of the bonuses have been paid already.

But the Erlanger trustees seem to have learned several lessons from the messy December episode.

* The bonuses plan was slipped into the board's agenda at the last minute, an act which gave little time for much discussion of the whys and wherefores of the upcoming dispersal and which gave the public the idea the board was trying to hide something.

To combat that this time around, the board held a three-hour public meeting about how the incentives work, delayed the initial re-vote to allow more time for the plan to be scrutinized and published an agenda that included the bonus resolutions well before Friday's meeting.

* Less than a month before the December board bonuses vote, Erlanger retirees were notified they would be cut off from the hospital's insurance plan. Had the hospital still been facing the desperately lean times it had reported only nine months earlier, before receiving $19 million in federal funding, such a move might have been seen as understandable.

Since the bonuses kerfuffle, with the urging from Republican state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, hospital officials have begun discussions about the possibility of reimbursing those retirees.

* State legislators, who had gone to bat for the hospital following its pleas of money woes and serious cuts in the spring of 2014, were understandably upset at the bonuses plan being slipped in at the last minute. Their criticism spurred a ruling from Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, who found that the Erlanger board had violated the state's open meeting law by discussing the bonuses behind closed doors before the meeting.

And in an attempt to thwart such private discussions in the future, legislators offered a bill that would have tightened the guidelines under which public hospitals could have closed meetings. But the legislation did not pass.

Heeding the legislators' displeasure, hospital officials have said they want to repair their relationship with the delegation. One of the ways they chose to do that was to hire former Tennessee Deputy Gov. and former Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey to smooth relations with legislators and to help with a number of hospital-related issues in Nashville.

One lesson which may not have been learned is the wisdom of giving bonuses after a sudden turnaround. Erlanger, for years, has ridden a roller-coaster of bottom lines -- up several million one year and down several million the next. It's understandable the hospital board would want to award bonuses if incentives it set were indeed met. But it might have been better to see if that turnaround becomes a two- or three-year trend.

Taxpayers should hope the next dip won't come any time soon.

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