A majority of the Patrick County Board of Supervisors said they stand by their decision on the need for a newly created position, but at least one member wants to take a second look.

Roger Hayden, of the Dan River District, said he “reluctantly supported” an October 16 motion to pay a consultant $10,000 per month to determine the financial viability of the former Pioneer Community Hospital of Patrick.

He explained his reluctance was because “I was never convinced it was truly needed, and at this point, no one has proved to me it will benefit our cause.”

The board also unanimously approved hiring the hospital administrator for not more than 16 hours per week at $65 per hour. He said he was told it would only take a couple of months for a consultant to determine how much money and how much debt the hospital incurred and figure out whether it was turning a profit.

The hospital closed in September after filing bankruptcy in 2016. County, town and economic development officials are trying to help identify potential buyers with the goal of reopening the hospital.

Hayden said he was asked to support the consultant post during a telephone poll of the supervisors. At that time, he voted against funding the post. Later, when the vote was ratified in open session, he said he thought the county needed as much information as possible to present to potential buyers and changed his vote to support it.

However, Hayden said he has since learned the financial information being sought was available online “and we wouldn’t have even had to hire someone.  Therefore, I am in favor of dissolving the position immediately. I’ll have to wait until the next meeting” on Nov. 20 to broach the subject.

Karl Weiss, of the Blue Ridge District, who also supported funding the position, said he stands by his ballot.

“I don’t take our hospital lightly. We could either spend a few thousand dollars to know exactly what’s going on” or not spend the money and not have the information available to potential buyers.

The information “could save us from making a $10 million mistake or it could contribute to us possibly buying the hospital and making a good $10 million decision,” Weiss said.

When asked if the county was considering buying the hospital, Weiss said “we’re looking at all options and without all the information and figures, we don’t have all the information on the table. We’re not looking to buy it and we’re not looking to not buy it. We’re just looking at all options.”

Like Hayden, Weiss said many told him the information was available online, “but when I tell them to produce it, not one shred of information has been produced to me yet. Nobody could give me the answers until we hired this consultant.”

Weiss said he has been praised for supporting the position.

“People expect me to represent them and this is something that had to be moved on quickly and without knowledge of what’s going on, I can’t make a decision on the hospital,” he said.

Peters Creek supervisor Rickie Fulcher said he also believes the position “has value because we do not know at this point in time what the outcome of the hospital situation will be. The more information we can derive for the future may be used to make decision.

He said a weekend straw vote was taken of the supervisors when they were asked about the position. A straw vote differs from a poll vote in that  it only determines whether there is support among board members, he said.

Fulcher said he also was told the information is available online, but “it’s how you interpret that information to really find out the root cause of things. You can look at any given chart, but it really doesn’t tell you the whole story. You’ve got to be able to decipher that data to be able to interpret what the best course of action would be.”

Vice Chairman Lock Boyce, of the Mayo River District, said it is “almost impossible to get accurate information” without a consultant. In a short time frame, Boyce said he has learned certain departments at the hospital “made a lot of money. The lab and medical imaging (x-rays, cat scans, etc.) was making a lot of money. The hospital itself was making a lot of money because the hospital was putting people in beds,” he said.

“The problem was the emergency room. People go to the ER when they can’t afford to pay” for visiting a doctor or don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare, Boyce said, adding uninsured patients drain hospital resources.

“Do we need an emergency room? Yes, because people are suffering and people are dying and what I’ve learned in my life is sometimes you’ve got to have help and you have to pay for help,” Boyce said.

“If you’ve got to have surgery, you’re going to have to have a surgeon, and you want the best you can find,” Boyce said. “We needed some financial surgery and we needed the best we could find and that’s what we did” in funding the position.

Smith River District supervisor and board chairman Crystal Harris wrote that she also stands by her nay vote, and also took issue with the way the weekend poll vote was conducted.

“It was not done right …. There had been no RFP (Request for Proposals, used to identify low bidders), and no one seemed to have been advised of exactly how much money was involved,” she said.

“I stand adamant in helping the hospital, everyone knows how near and dear it is to me, but also I stand adamant on (use of) taxpayer’s money to hire a consultant when this information had already been given and could easily be found on the Internet,” Harris said.

“I feel so strongly about spending taxpayer’s money that I have to speak out. I’m not blaming my fellow board members for their vote,” Harris said. “I don’t know what kind of information they were given, but poll votes are never good. They’re mainly to be used in emergencies. It’s never good to make a poll vote, except when it is a dire necessity.”

Harris said she will do anything “within reason” to save the hospital, “but we don’t have a dog in this fight.” A potential sale, she noted, will be determined by potential buyers and the bankruptcy court, not the county.