The University of Texas System regents should provide reasonable assurance they will build a $500 million surgical tower at the University of Texas Medical Branch when certain conditions are met.
If you’ve missed the story, it goes like this: Hurricane Ike flooded the medical branch campus, including the first floor of John Sealy Hospital, which housed things vital to the operation of a hospital — the blood bank and pharmacy, for example.
To get federal money to make repairs, the medical branch has to move those operations up, into space once housing hospital rooms.
Meanwhile, the medical branch long has had plans to increase the size of rooms in John Sealy, partly in an effort to better compete with other hospitals for paying patients.
That means John Sealy, which once could accommodate 550 or so patients, will be reduced to about 300 beds, 100 for state prison inmates.
Local leaders all seem to agree that allowing the medical branch’s hospital capacity to be cut that sharply would be the beginning of the end for the state’s oldest medical school and the county’s largest employer.
The economic consequences would be profoundly bad for every city in the county.
So, some of those leaders have been working to get 500 or so beds back.
State Rep. Craig Eiland got a commitment from the Texas Legislature for $150 million to help build the new tower.
The Sealy and Smith Foundation has pledged $125 million or so.
The UT System would be responsible for about $200 million.
The state’s $150 million came with a caveat: The county must begin paying for specialty and hospital care of uninsured residents earning at or less than 100 percent of the federal poverty level.
County commissioners plan to take up that issue this week.
The only equivocal voice has been that of the regents.
We pressed them for a simple answer last week.
All we got was that regents were committed to “planning” the hospital.
Under other circumstances, that might be enough.
But the regents have a self-inflicted credibility problem. They caused it in part by meeting in El Paso to approve laying off almost 3,000 medical branch employees.
El Paso was as far from the consequences of that decision as was legally possible to be.
People worthy of trust would have held that meeting in Levin Hall.
The regents could muster only a flimsy rationale for not having done so: The meeting already was planned for El Paso.
Likewise, the regents recently decided the whole deal depends on an ironclad guarantee the Legislature will continue a $96 million increase in operating money approved for the medical branch in the last session.
That had not come up before, and it’s interesting because the regents had considered approving the tower before Ike ever happened, before the state ever approved the $150 million, or the $96 million.
The board was ready to vote, probably to affirm, when one member asked for a little more information and the item was deferred.
The fact is, the regents could make a reasonable statement of their commitment without violating any fiduciary responsibility.
Local leaders who will face the political heat for having kept their part of the bargain are justified in wondering why they won’t do that.
