Board Newcomers Vow to Save Hospital : Camarillo: Officials say the merger of the local facility with St. John’s Regional Medical center in Oxnard is proceeding.

Three Camarillo residents elected to the board of the city’s health care district vowed Wednesday to fight the merger of Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley Hospital with St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

“We ran for the purpose of saving the hospital,” said new board member James Jeffers. “We’re going to stop the merger. If it takes some money to do it, we’ll spend it.”

But Sheryl Rudie, a spokeswoman for Pleasant Valley Hospital, said Wednesday that “the merger is proceeding as planned. The district has no authority over the hospital.”

The district ran the hospital until 1983, when officials felt that a private nonprofit corporation could do a better job of managing the facility and raising money.

The pending merger was announced in February.

Two weeks ago, after the Camarillo hospital failed to agree to maintain services for eight years, the five-member board voted to ask the state attorney general to investigate whether the merger violates any state laws.

The other two new board members, Jean Daily Underwood and former Camarillo Mayor John Rush, will join in the fight to prevent the merger, possibly by eminent domain, Jeffers said.

All three new board members, who will join the panel Dec. 4, had criticized the present board’s actions as “doing too little, too late,” Rush said.

“I think the situation is in a crisis and I want to act as quickly as possible,” Rush said.

Health care district workers said they worried that their already cash-strapped programs will take a back seat to an intensified legal battle over the hospital. The district provides an array of programs to more than 350 Camarillo residents, ranging from an adult day-care center to an adolescent counseling program.

The district already has had to eliminate a nutrition program to pay $52,000 in attorneys’ and experts’ fees to investigate the merger.

But these services are “secondary to the hospital,” said Jeffers, who helped formed the district in 1969 and was the attorney for the district in the mid-’70s. “The district was formed to be a hospital district.”

Board members Richard D. Culbert, Dr. Gerald Karpman and Marion Gordon were defeated in Tuesday’s election.

“I hope that the newly elected people will put as much effort into saving the district’s program as saving the hospital,” Karpman said.

A bitter Culbert said the public has made a mistake if it thinks that the hospital merger can be stopped.

“Sounds great, but the district has no money. That’s what John Q. Citizen failed to recognize and consider,” Culbert said.

But Underwood said her victory showed that the people knew what they were doing. “They understand the issue and the importance of the hospital remaining in our own hands,” she said.