Polk County commissioners met in Benton Thursday, March 12, to decide if they were interested in a proposal to provide health care at Copper Basin Medical Center (CBMC).
Alvin Word of Cleveland, Tennessee, had approached County Executive Robby Hatcher, laying out a basic idea and asking to meet with the commission board to determine if there was interest in moving forward.
Opening the meeting, Hatcher told the commissioners, “this is the best opportunity we’ve had presented ... this is a starting point.”
Word told commissioners he has 20-plus years of “turnaround administration,” working with small, rural facilities. He later went into the hands-on medical field.
“I do sense there is an opportunity” for a medical center at the Copper Basin facility, he told commissioners. But he was careful to note this will be a long term process, and the outcome will not be a hospital such as the community has known.
In laying out a basic plan, he said the first step would be to establish an emergent care center, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Successfully completing that step would begin the next step, which could be extended care, hospice care, or meeting law enforcement needs for psychological prisoners.
Word estimated it would take three years for a viable, operational facility that would be utilized fully.
He asked the commissioners for a three-year lease, at one dollar a year, as the starting point to begin researching financing and putting his plan into motion.
At the end of the three years, he said he would purchase the facility or have a buyer. “When it’s operational in full, it will be bought,” Word said.
He also said part of his plan was to bring former CBMC employees back in and, over time, reimburse them for the wages they were not paid when that hospital closed.
For over an hour, commissioners and members of the audience fired questions and scenarios at Word, many of which were repeated more than once, involving particulars of services, funding, and what will happen to the equipment in the building.
Doug Collins, Ducktown’s mayor, said “the city’s not going to spend no more” money on the facility than what it’s having to pay now to keep it up.
Many commissioners’ comments focused on money, whether from equipment, the fear of future inventemts or recouping what is already invested.
In the end, commissioners walked away without taking a vote to give Word the okay to pursue a proposal.
However, Commissioner John Pippenger, who led much of the discussion, gave Hatcher the thumbs up to work with Word on a plan to be brought back to the commissioners.
Hatcher said that after the meeting he also asked and received the okay to move forward with talks with Word from commissioners Dewey Esquinance, Greg Brooks, Debbie Davis, and Samantha Trantham.
Commissioner James Woody was the other commissioner at the meeting. Neither commissioners Daniel Deal or Jeremy Kimsey were present.