Soon it may be up to Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger to decide whether or not El Camino Hospital should behave like a public entity.
Assemblywoman Sally Lieber hopes a bill, which passed through the Senate judiciary committee last Tuesday, would demand that El Camino comply with all public agency standards of financial disclosure and employment laws. But hospital officials claim her bill only serves union interests.
“We would not be required to provide any information publicly that we’re not already providing,” said hospital spokesman Jon Friedenberg.
Lieber’s district bill passed 3-1 in the Senate committee and is specific to the El Camino Hospital District.
“What we’re really driving at with this bill,” Lieber said in a phone interview, “is to see that the district and the non-profit fulfill all the responsibilities to the public that would be required if they didn’t have the non-profit entity as a middle man.”
El Camino Hospital District created a 501c3 corporation — with the same name and the same five elected officials on the board — to operate the 395-bed hospital. Recently, El Camino has come under scrutiny for a lack of transparency with financial and operational decisions, such as CEO compensation and the upcoming termination of subacute, long-term care.
But hospital officials argue that the sole reason for the proposed legislation is to allow the Service Employees International Union to force all employees to pay union dues by permitting another agency shop election where only union members would vote.
The hospital held the last election in 2003 and an attempt to form an agency shop failed to get the majority of employees to vote in favor of it, said Friedenberg, who traveled to Sacramento last Tuesday to speak out against Lieber’s bill. The last two-year contract was ratified in September 2005.
“I don’t understand how you can justify singling out El Camino. It’s hardly a public policy issue,” Friedenberg said.
Lieber denies that her bill is simply a gift to the SEIU; she argues that it addresses more than a decade of the hospital’s history of a lack of public accountability.
“Jon Friedenberg is trying to cast this as a bill about the agency shop issue and I think the change to agency shop is a minor part of things,” Lieber said, adding, “There needs to be some accountability here so we think the legislation is needed.”
In committee, the no-vote came from the lone voting Republican, Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, who agreed with Friedenberg.
“It would be better to have this dispute resolved by way of a lawsuit than introducing a special bill and special legislation,” Harman told the Voice in a phone interview. “I didn’t think it was an appropriate topic for legislation.”
The bill’s approving votes came from state senators Martha Escutia, D-Montebello, Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, and Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove. The fifth committee member and the second Republican, Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside, was absent.
Now that the bill has passed through the first hurdle of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it must gain approval from the Senate and then the Assembly before reaching Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And AB 759 has a good chance of making it there, according to Gloria Ochoa, deputy chief counsel for the Senate judiciary committee.
“Generally, with district bills, when they get through policy committees not too much interference happens from the other people,” Ochoa said.
“It just makes sense,” she continued, “when they receive public assets and they operate them with public money, they should be subject to restrictions that public agencies are required to comply with.”
Lieber said the bill should reach the Senate floor by the second week in August, and after passing through the Assembly, Gov. Schwartzenegger would have until Oct. 15 to sign it. Assembly member Ira Ruskin has signed on as a joint author, Lieber said.
“We’re very hopeful we can get the bill all the way through the process,” Lieber said. “It’s definitely a high priority bill for us and reflects an issue that’s been in the community for years, of trying to get more transparency, more openness.”
E-mail Molly Tanenbaum at mtanenbaum@mv-voice.com
