New Smyrna hospital to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees for Sunshine Law case
Sep 30, 2011
The following article was published in the Daytona Beach News-Journal on September 30, 2011:
New Smyrna Hospital to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees for Sunshine Law case
By Anne Geggis
Litigation involving what some have called the biggest Sunshine Law violation in Florida came to an end Thursday night as Bert Fish Medical Center board members approved a settlement to pay the lawyers who sued them nearly $1 million in legal fees.
The money will come from the Southeast Volusia Hospital District’s insurance policy.
The final turn in the case with many twists — including an aborted hospital merger involving tens of millions dollars — ended with a gesture of reconciliation from Dr. William Schildecker, president of the Bert Fish Foundation, whose attorneys had brought the suit.
“I’m sorry about the lawsuit — it tore me apart to do that,” said Schildecker, who has worked at the hospital since it first opened in 1954.
The foundation Schildecker leads is a philanthropic organization that donated Bert Fish Medical Center to the Southeast Volusia Hospital District in 1966.
In August 2010, however, the foundation sued to stop a merger between public Bert Fish and private nonprofit Adventist Health because it was the result of meetings illegally closed to the public. Those 21 meetings had been closed on the advice of the board’s former attorney, Jim Heekin.
Schildecker, sitting at Thursday’s meeting in a wing at Bert Fish named after him, said not addressing the state Sunshine Law violations that occurred would have jeopardized the hospital in the future.
“This is a great hospital,” he said, urging the hospital board to work with the foundation in the future. “It’s so necessary to the community.”
Indigent care at the 112-bed hospital is supported with taxes from property owners in Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach, Oak Hill and a portion of Port Orange. The deal with Adventist Health would have made it the sixth area hospital under control of the Winter Park-based nonprofit which does business in this area as Florida Hospital.
But the deal — including an agreement that paid Bert Fish’s outgoing CEO three years of his salary — was immediately controversial. It was approved at a meeting with no public debate among the members of the Southeast Volusia Hospital District Board.
The two suitors that had been spurned from the Bert Fish partnership in favor of Adventist said they would have lowered taxes more than the possible tax payments the deal with Adventist represented.
One of those spurned, Daytona Beach-based Halifax Health, also a public system, helped the Bert Fish Foundation finance the litigation of the Sunshine Law case, contributing $240,000 to those costs.
Ultimately, the case culminated with Circuit Judge Richard Graham ruling last February the Sunshine Law violations that occurred before the deal was approved could not be cured by a subsequent do-over.
The board’s former attorney, Darryl Bloodworth, who had led the Southeast Volusia Hospital District through the do-over, urged board members Thursday night to accept the negotiated settlement with the foundation lawyers. The $999,735 the board ultimately approved was an 8 percent reduction from what foundation lawyers had said they were owed — and did not include the amount Halifax had contributed to the case, he said.
“That means a long, difficult chapter for the district will come to an end,” Bloodworth said, explaining that it will be paid through the district’s insurance, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.
Also at Thursday’s meeting, the board received an update on its malpractice claim against its former attorney Heekin. The board’s demand letter for $22.5 million is being analyzed, Bloodworth said.
Tom DeSimone, one of the two members of the board remaining from the one that approved the aborted merger, said he still believes Adventist was the right partner for Bert Fish.
“The doctors, the patients and the employees were all pleased with the relationship,” he said. “We may have made the right choice, we just went about it in the wrong way.”
Find this article here: http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/local/southeast-volusia/2011/09/30/new-smyrna-hospital-to-pay-nearly-1-million-in-legal-fees-for-sunshine-law-case.html