By Mark Scott
Buffalo, NY – Erie County's transfer of the Erie County Medical Center to a public benefit corporation came under fire Friday by State Comptroller Alan Hevesi.
The state's top fiscal watchdog says the transfer was nothing more than a "fiscal gimmick" designed to generate $85 million to help the county close a gap in the current year's budget. Hevesi said "that's just bad governance."
He said county taxpayers will end up paying $214 million in principal and interest over the next 30 years.
"This transaction was more important to the county as a fiscal gimmick to allow it to do a borrowing through the Medical Center to solve a one-year budget problem, and therefore saddle the taxpayer with huge costs over the next 30 years," Hevesi said. "It does not improve anybody's provision of health care because there is no plan to provide health care."
But ECMC spokesman Tom Quatroche disagrees. He says the new corporation has drafted a plan that was presented to state auditors earlier this week. Hevesi says it's just a transitional plan covering the next year. But Quatroche says it's already paying dividends.
"The purpose of the public benefit corporation was to allow us to partner, to create joint ventures and to get out from under the county bureaucracy," Quatroche said. "We've already seen benefits. We have begun to really change the way we do business here. We're acting more like a business."
Quatroche said he is "deeply troubled" by the adversarial approach. He points out that while Hevesi sees the deal as being bad for ECMC and county taxpayers, the actual report states the county improved its financial standing with the credit markets.