County endorses hospital proposal

CENTRAL CITY, Neb. — The Merrick County Board of Supervisors gave county hospital officials the go-ahead Tuesday to continue their plans for a new hospital and long-term care facility.

Mike Bowman, administrator of the Litzenberg Memorial County Hospital, gave the board details of its plans to build a new 15-bed hospital and 32-bed long-term care facility on a new site in Central City.

Bowman said the hospital board has been discussing a new building for about a year because of the current 53-year-old building’s deficiencies, which include small surgery units, nonprivate patient rooms and handicapped-inaccessible bathrooms.

“Quite frankly, our existing building is just inadequate,” Bowman said.

A new hospital would cost about $25 million, plus $9 million for a new long-term care facility, Bowman said. The hospital is planning to finance it through revenue bonds, which would require Merrick County voters’ approval but would not be paid off with local tax revenues.

Hospital officials plan to make debt payments each year with increased revenue generated by a new building. If those payments couldn’t be made, as much as 90 percent of the bonds could be secured by the federal government, said Pat Maginnis, the hospital’s chief financial officer.

Bowman said the hospital board is looking at two potential sites — one on 40 acres south of the town’s middle school, and another east of the high school.

He said the hospital board had considered remodeling the current building but found problems so pervasive that it would be cheaper and simpler to build a new hospital.

A new building would require more space, and the hospital’s current site on Nebraska Highway 14 doesn’t have enough.

Bowman said the hospital’s long-term care facility faces many of the same problems as the hospital: little privacy, bathrooms that aren’t handicapped-accessible and a design that doesn’t reflect the major changes in elder care over the past several decades.

“Baby boomers are probably not going to want to live in the kind of facilities that we have in our area right now,” Bowman said.

Because the long-term care unit is attached to the hospital, it can’t be certified as a skilled nursing facility like many assisted living centers are, he said. The hospital’s plans call for a new long-term care facility to be built on the same grounds as the hospital but unattached.

Bowman said that medical care has moved from primarily inpatient to outpatient over the years since the hospital was built, but the current building isn’t equipped to handle that change.

Supervisor Rex Weller of Palmer saw in the issue a bigger-picture question about whether local health care would survive in Merrick County.

“Actually, what we’re looking at here is the long-term prospects of having a full-service hospital here in Central City,” Weller said.

The County Board’s vote Tuesday was not to put the issue on the ballot — Bowman said Litzenberg is aiming for a public vote late this year or early in 2011 — but only to signal their approval of Litzenberg officials’ planning process for the new hospital.

As owner of the hospital, the County Board has the final say over whether to send the bond issue to voters.

Bowman said the board’s approval Tuesday will allow the hospital to launch a feasibility study and begin applying for federal assistance for the project.

Litzenberg officials tried to pass a $4 million bond issue in 2001 to renovate the hospital, but voters rejected it. The hospital then took out $2.2 million in bonds in 2002 to do some of the proposed work on areas such as long-term care and the outpatient clinic, paying them off with donations and a federal loan.

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