Officials Angry Over Hospital Phone Poll

Ventura County officials expressed outrage and disappointment Wednesday over a telephone poll conducted by Community Memorial Hospital that asked residents whether the county should close its public hospital.

“It makes me angry,” Supervisor Maggie Kildee said. “It makes it hard not to believe that their goal is to put us out of business.”

Supervisors Frank Schillo and Judy Mikels expressed similar concerns. They said the poll would only make it more difficult to improve relations with the private hospital, which spent more than $1.3 million on a successful referendum campaign to block the rival Ventura County Medical Center from building a new wing.

After the March 26 election, hospital Director Michael Bakst said he was willing to “hold out the olive branch for us to jointly study the health care needs of Ventura County.”

But Schillo said Community Memorial had set back any opportunity for healing the wounds left from the bitter campaign over the county hospital wing.

“They offer an olive branch, but they’ve got a knife in the other hand,” he said.

Sal Russo, a Community Memorial consultant, said the private hospital had no plans to launch a new campaign aimed at shutting down the county hospital.

He said a telephone survey of 800 county residents was conducted over the weekend to “get a look at what voters were thinking” after the election.

Russo said he also conducted a focus group on county health-care issues at the Oxnard Hilton on Monday night. But he declined to say what specific questions were asked in either the poll or the focus group.

“We covered every conceivable option to get a sense of what people thought about health care in Ventura County,” he said.

Vicki Chandler, executive director of the Ventura County Resource Foundation, which raises money for the county hospital, said she was one of the people interviewed for the telephone poll and was disturbed by the questions concerning the closure of the county hospital.

“I was very irritated and angry,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, here we go again.’ ”