Assemblywoman Sally Lieber decided to put her foot down in the dispute between El Camino Hospital and the Service Employees International Union Local 715 last week by announcing a proposed piece of legislation that she said would define El Camino as a public hospital once and for all.
Her announcement of the bill last Friday came only three days after the SEIU filed a similar lawsuit against El Camino Hospital. The suit demands increased disclosure of financial information and a judicial determination that El Camino is indeed a public agency.
“We think this bill will clarify things so the public won’t have to resort to a lawsuit to get basic information,” she said, referring both to the SEIU suit as well as the suit the Voice filed a year ago requesting salary information of top-paid El Camino employees.
Lieber explained on Friday that her bill would not only address the latest litigation against El Camino Hospital requesting financial disclosure, but also the recent decision to close the hospital’s subacute services, because it would force the hospital to behave like a public agency.
The El Camino Hospital District, with a publicly elected board of directors, owns the hospital, which is operated by a nonprofit 501c3 corporation with the same name. Whether they should abide by public agency or nonprofit rules for financial disclosure has been the subject of recent scrutiny.
“I think that this is a public asset, it ought to function like a public asset and we ought to, as community members, understand their financials and understand what’s going on with the district,” Lieber said.
But hospital officials argue that the bill “would have one effect: It would impose agency shop on the employees,” said spokesperson Jon Friedenberg. “Everything else is window dressing.”
On the same day they filed the lawsuit last week, about 25 SEIU members marched to El Camino’s administrative offices demanding an agency shop election, which, if successful, would require all employees to pay union dues and be represented by the union.
El Camino Hospital currently has 984 employees who would be eligible to join the SEIU, and out of those, 508 (about 52 percent) are SEIU members, according to hospital spokesperson Judy Twitchell.
Friedenberg said that when the hospital held the last election in 2003, an attempt to form an agency shop failed to get the majority of employees to vote in favor of it. The last two-year contract was ratified in September 2005.
Under public sector labor laws, employees could request an agency shop election any time, Lieber said, and so far, El Camino has not granted another election.
“It seems like a ploy,” said Interim CEO Marla Gularte in a phone interview. “It’s another way for SEIU to try to get agency shop at El Camino when in fact they already have a negotiated agreement that they’re operating under.”
Gularte said Lieber had not contacted the hospital regarding the bill, and that El Camino officials found out about her Friday press conference through reading the newspaper that morning.
“They seem to be attacking us on all fronts on this agency shop issue,” she added. “For us to spend time, energy and legal resources fighting it seems to be a waste of the hospital’s money and a distraction from what our core business really is.”
But Lieber insists that the bill extends far beyond the agency shop issue to a history of El Camino Hospital withholding key information from the public.
“This controversy of the community trying to get information from the district has been going on for years and years now. I think it’s unfortunate that every time questions from the community come up that they minimize the concerns that are out there,” she said.
One such recent community concern has involved the hospital’s decision to shut down its subacute facility by the end of 2008. One of the plaintiffs in the SEIU lawsuit, Victor Bazan, whose wife, Adela, is a long-term subacute patient at El Camino, stood in support of Lieber’s bill on Friday with his wife, who sat in a wheelchair.
He said he backed Lieber’s bill because he believes the hospital should have sought public input when deciding to terminate subacute services, requiring about 40 patients and 40 nursing assistants to relocate.
“They believe this is Enron where they can do anything they want,” he said. “With one decision, they opened Pandora’s Box.”
However, Friedenberg said Lieber’s bill is unrelated to that issue.
“It would have zero impact on that decision and the process that resulted in that decision,” he said.
Lieber said the bill is currently in senate committee, and that she hopes to move forward with it soon.
“I’m very hopeful that it will pass,” she said.
E-mail Molly Tanenbaum at mtanenbaum@mv-voice.com
