Rival Gathers Opinions on Hospital Plan

In preparation for the next skirmish in Ventura’s ongoing medical war, Community Memorial Hospital confirmed Thursday that it has hired a market research firm to poll county residents on proposed improvements at the county hospital.

“We’ve been doing some public opinion polling in Ventura County,” said Doug Dowie, the Los Angeles-based spokesman for Community Memorial. “The reason being that the Board of Supervisors have made it very clear that they are still interested in going forward on their plans to expand the county hospital.”

Community Memorial, the nonprofit hospital just a few blocks from the county’s public hospital, has so far blocked every attempt by the county to improve its aging facility, accusing the county of trying to lure away its private-pay patients.

The county accuses Community Memorial of wanting to shut down the public facility, which serves county government employees as well as the poor, indigent and uninsured.

Just last month, county supervisors repealed their own approval of a $28.7-million county hospital improvement because of the threat of a referendum led by Community Memorial. At that time, the supervisors vowed to return in December with a plan to replace the decrepit facilities that could cost the hospital its state license: a crumbling kitchen, cafeteria and cramped medical laboratory.

Referring to that vow as the “supervisors’ stubborn attempts to go forward,” Dowie said Community Memorial conducted the poll to gauge public opinion on the issue.

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County officials said Thursday they are frustrated by Community Memorial’s continual barrage of political and legal efforts to stop them from bringing the 75-year-old public hospital up to accreditation standards.

“It’s a morale buster,” Administrator Sam Edwards said.

Supervisor Frank Schillo called for Community Memorial to share the results of the poll, including raw data and the complete list of questions pollsters asked.

“I’d like to shine a little daylight on what they are doing,” Schillo said. “If they withhold it, we know what they are doing, and that is misleading the public. So I challenge them to release this information.”

“Ask him if he’s going to pay us for it,” retorted Dowie, who added that Community Memorial has no plans to make the poll public. “I’m not sure we’re going to share it with anyone, let alone Supervisor Schillo.”

Edwards said he was not surprised when he heard that residents were being blitzed with phone calls from researchers hired by Community Memorial.

“I presume that they will do whatever it takes to close this hospital to preserve their own future,” Edwards said.

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He said the poll is designed to do more than just solicit opinions.

“It makes people think in the direction of the way the questions are leading,” he said.

This is not the first time Community Memorial has used telephone surveys in its battle with the county hospital. During a $1.6-million campaign last spring that successfully destroyed the county’s plans to build an outpatient center on the Loma Vista campus, residents also were probed for opinions on the issue.

Dowie refused to disclose Thursday how much was spent on this poll, which is being conducted by a Calabasas market research firm. And he said questions posed by the poll--including whether residents would support a $3-million limit on repairs at the county hospital--hold no special significance beyond eliciting opinion.

“You’ll play around with things,” Dowie said. “That doesn’t mean that you’re going to propose them.”

Although polling questions raised the notion of a ballot measure to limit the price of repairs at the county hospital, Dowie would say only that he thinks “that taxpayers having a say in how their money is spent by elected officials is a good thing.”

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According to one Ventura resident who was polled, callers posed questions about how poor people should receive medical treatment, whether there is a glut of hospital beds in the county, and whether the county really needs a new cafeteria, kitchen and lab to keep its license. Callers asked residents how they voted on Measure X and if they knew who put it on the ballot.

Community Memorial sponsored the ballot initiative, which asked voters if they would support the proposed $56-million county outpatient center.

They also asked if voters would be likely to support the hospital project if they were told the new kitchen would be “the same size as the kitchen at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas,” a pet comparison of Dowie’s.

The most recently proposed county plan for improvements at the hospital called for building a 7,254-square-foot kitchen and an 8,400-square-foot cafeteria, but county officials backed away from it in October and are now working on a scaled-back version.

Asked how big their kitchen is, officials at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas said Thursday that their 30-story pyramid-shaped hotel has 47,000 square feet of kitchen space. They said because the hotel is so vast, there are six dining facilities within the hotel to accommodate all the guests. Stacked end to end, kitchens in each add up to 47,000 square feet.

Dowie said he was told a different number, the 6,500-square-foot kitchen that supplies the hotel’s banquet facilities. That is the number he has been basing his comparison on, Dowie said.

Community Memorial’s kitchen is 3,469 square feet, he said.

Schillo said the nature of the question about the Luxor implies that the county hospital plans a kitchen of decadent scale.

“They’re probably trying to connote that this was a very lavish kind of facility when it is not,” he said.

It would actually be just a basic cafeteria, complete with “jello with carrots chopped up in it,” Schillo said.

Administrator Edwards said state requirements force the hospital to store enough food and water to ride out a two-week emergency if necessary. Much of the square footage would be for that storage, he said.

The survey also asked how residents feel about Community Memorial Hospital. Dowie said the facility has been confident to date that it is well-perceived in the community. But because of the controversial nature of the hospital issue, he said, “We are interested in how people feel about us.”

Community Memorial officials have repeatedly denied that their goal is to put the county medical center out of business.

But the private hospital has proposed that the public hospital be converted to an outpatient center, and that the county contract with Community Memorial for inpatient services.