On a fine Fort Bragg autumn morning, the very day of the Mendocino Coast District Hospital Board of Directors candidates forum at the senior center, I swung by the hospital to ask for the budget. I thought it would be simple. In my innocence, I assumed that the hospital would provide any candidate any information they asked for. I tucked the dogs into their comfy space in the back of the truck and walked up to the old building with new eyes. This is also Fort Bragg.
In our little city's rollicking democracy the love of community goes beyond sentiment and I have to say, a little beyond the local patriotism and the sense of participation in local affairs one finds in America generally. Our packed City Hall meetings and our more than a reasonable semi-annual crop of political yard signs are the outward expressions of an intense sense of ownership. It comes from our isolation and it gives us a beloved autonomy. It’s 35 miles of twisting notoriously dangerous road to anywhere else. That doesn't sound like much if you’ve never driven it. We are Fort Bragg. It’s rather a fine thing to feel. Someone said it that night at the forum, we are an island. Two roads in if there is no major weather.
Like every other aspect of our civic infrastructure, the hospital was built for the thriving town that worked at the old lumber mill. The lumber bosses had to make life in the deep woods palatable for a continuing community. The mill was too damn big to depend on transient or short-term labor. It was an ambitious project to harvest the largest redwood rainforest on earth, so they let us build a town. They helped us build it. Rolling back over Highway 20 with your wife in labor, or getting appendicitis in the great green woods was a fine reason to move somewhere else. The hospital was our declaration of physical independence.
Since the closure of the mill, every element of our civic prosperity has been mule-kicked. Hard. When the mill operated the city sold 2 million gallons of water to the people. Now we sell 700.000. The city government has been in a largely undisclosed chronic budget deficit for the last ten years. It was in the extremity of financial distress that the city council achieved the gumption to hire a new City Manager.
Now Fort Bragg is slightly solvent but riding the razor's edge. Paving our alleys has been on the drawing board since the 19th century. Everybody wants it, but we don’t have the cash. The city still gets primary water (in a few instances) through hollowed out redwood trees.
The feds give us money for our nice streets and sidewalks, but a great deal of our infrastructure is shot. Take a look sometime down the storm drains and you can see toilet paper that has escaped from private sewage lines. We can sort of live with all of that, but not without the hospital. Take the hospital away and we are not the independent place we love. MCDH is the ultimate expression of our independence as a city and the most glaring example of our decomposing infrastructure. We don’t have the mill. All we have is their leftover hospital.
Nobody is saying so, but the financial condition of MCDH is terminal.
By 2030 the hospital faces an unfunded mandate to erect a new building. Extensive earthquake damage to hospital buildings at Loma Prieta in 1989, and in Northridge in 1994, gave the State Legislature many sleepless nights, so they laid down a law to require new earthquake-safe hospital structures.
When the state disaster preparedness folks came to Fort Bragg they told us that in the last super major earthquake in Fort Bragg (1700s) the coast, the actual coast, moved 65 feet. Science informs us, we could get an 8.5 any time now. We have to build a new hospital. The state in their wisdom and prudence understood the problem but did not provide any suggestions (or money) as to how California's small towns are to pay for a shiny new hospital.
Does 2030 sound like a long way off? In gentle Fort Bragg, a failing hospital is trying unsuccessfully to pave the parking lot. They’ve been working on that one for a couple of years now.
I went through the glass doors and asked at the front desk for a copy of the budget. I couldn’t get one. The comprehensive budget is outside the need to know for board candidates. The Hospital staff was quite firm and not particularly nice about it. The chief executive officer, Mr. Edwards, had conducted a little seminar for aspirants to the board of directors. At that meeting, he assured us that he was very open to helping us work through the learning curve. In my dismay, I went looking for him. I asked for him at the information central desk and they sent me to his office. I found his locked door and his administrative secretary's office also locked, and ended up back at the desk. By a miracle that helpful person had discovered that Mr. Edwards was on an emergency family leave. The whole process took half an hour.
Questing for information from people who don’t necessarily want to give it to me is what I do. I do it for you. In the end, the financial officer, Mr. Ellis, emerged reluctantly from the labyrinth and told me that I could not get the budget. We discussed this politely and agreed that they would provide it (since they are required to do so by law) if I would file a public information request form. I did. They have 10 days.
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