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Anti-hospital group seeks to postpone public hearing
A group of Broadlands residents has asked the county to postpone the Oct. 15 Planning Commission public hearing on the proposed Broadlands Regional Medical Center.
Rhonda Paice, attorney for the Concerned Citizens of Broadlands, charges in a letter to Director of Planning Julie Pastor that the disclosures of ownership in the application for the 164-bed hospital do not satisfy the requirements of a county ordinance.
A chart of the ownership disclosed in the application, included by Paice in her letter to Pastor, starts with Northern Virginia Community Hospital and descends through five more layers of ownership to a tier of 13 individuals – one is former Tennessee Sen. William Frist – and companies, including Bain Capital Integral Investors and Merrill Lynch Ventures LP 2001.
By failing to disclose ownership in more detail, Paice writes, the application does not meet the county's legal requirements.
"I and my clients feel the county should cancel the Oct. 15 public hearing until they get the disclosures right," she said.
Van Armstrong, in the county's Planning Department, said late Oct. 10 that he had seen the letter -- delivered to the county late Oct. 9 -- and he had referred it to Mark Looney, the attorney for the Broadlands Regional Medical Center application. Armstrong said he is waiting for Looney's response to the letter, specifically his level of comfort with the level of disclosure and the completeness of the application.
Looney, in an Oct. 14 letter to Pastor, called the charges unfounded. The disclosure submitted with the application, he wrote, "provides sufficient information to allow members of the Planning Commission to determine if the potential of a conflict exists."
"The Concerned Citizens of Broadlands does not want this hospital in the Broadlands neighborhood," Paice said. The group's goal, she said, is to make everyone aware of the true ownership of the applicant.
In an Oct. 14 letter hand-delivered to supervisors and planning commissioners, Paice likened consulting the applicant's attorney to "asking the fox about guarding the henhouse."
By midday Oct. 14, Paice had not received a response from the county to her clients' request that the public hearing be delayed until the applicant's ownership disclosures satisfy the requirements of the county's ordinance.
"Failure to uphold those public disclosure laws can only lead to inevitable questions about why HCA, BRMC and the Wall Street companies who own them are getting special favors on the zoning application from the Loudoun county government," Paice wrote.
Late in the day Oct. 14, the county attorney was reviewing the complaint and the disclosures and had not yet determined if postponement of the public hearing would be the correct course of action, according to the County Administrator's office.
Mark Foust, with HCA, said "This action does not serve the community good -- it only advances the cause of those who oppose BRMC for their own narrow self-interest. The community deserves this application to go forward and to be heard because it wants and it needs this hospital to be built."
A Planning Commission public hearing on the hospital application was originally scheduled Sept. 25. It was canceled and rescheduled for Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. after Paice brought to the attention of county administration that the legally required signs posted along Broadlands Boulevard directed citizens not to Eagle Ridge Middle School, the venue of the hearing, but to the County Government Building in Leesburg.
Other citizen groups made their views known prior to the public hearing. The Broadlands Residents for BRMC, a self-described independent grassroots group of Broadlands residents that supports the hospital application, held a press conference Oct. 10 at the Broadlands Nature Center. It offered data it said showed that Inova Loudoun Hospital's fees are higher than those of HCA-owned Reston Hospital, and that U.S. 50 is 10 years from having the population density to support a hospital.
At the press conference, Eric Steenstra, a Broadlands resident, leveled charges that the Concerned Citizens of Broadlands is funded by Inova Loudoun Hospital and that it does not represent the majority of Broadlands residents.
The same day, Loudoun Medical Group, one of the county's largest physician-owned practices, issued a statement urging that the next hospital be built not in Broadlands but along U.S. 50.
Inova Loudoun Hospital has opposed the construction of a competing facility five miles from its Lansdowne hospital since the application was filed in 2002. Inova Loudoun CEO Randy Kelley last month announced that if HCA moves its project to land it already owns on U.S. 50 near South Riding, Inova Loudoun Hospital will drop its opposition.
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