The following letter was adopted by a majority of the Jefferson County Hospital District No. 2 Board of Commissioners  on June 18.

Commissioner Matt Ready has accused his four fellow Commissioners at Jefferson Healthcare (JH) of violating the Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) with regards to their involvement in CEO Mike Glenn’s preparation and submittal of a response called the Peninsula Health Alliance Proposal to Olympic Medical Center’s (OMC) request for proposals (RFP).

We believed that we were in compliance with the OPMA when we held one executive session in February to learn about the real estate and other components of the Alliance proposal. We had a second executive session in March to consult with our attorney Brad Berg regarding our decision to use an executive session in February and he believed that our decision could be justified.

Because of Commissioner Ready’s charges against his fellow Commissioners, our CEO Mike Glenn and attorney Berg, we are currently seeking a second opinion from another municipal law attorney in a separate firm.

We believe that Commissioner Ready committed violations of the Executive Session confidentiality laws.

We affirm that Commissioner Ready’s allegations of criminal action by the board or CEO are absolutely and completely false.

We believe Mike Glenn acted within his authority as CEO when he submitted an Alliance proposal to OMC. At no time did he seek consent on either the content or request permission to submit the proposal during the executive sessions. It was also his right to seek private input from two individual board members early in the drafting process and to invite two members to attend meetings with OMC later.

In fact, OMC requested board members attend the joint meeting. These were not serial meetings because the roles of the commissioners were entirely different. At no time did he negotiate any terms with OMC. He simply presented the Alliance proposal. As required by OMC of all RFP respondents he signed a non-disclosure agreement but at no time did he commit to bind JH to any other agreement.

The Alliance proposal clearly states that the JH Board would continue to have full control over its governance and assets. It could choose to sell, purchase, or share real-estate, and that was the initial justification for an executive session in February. Sharing of services with OMC and/or real-estate swaps and/or sales could be done through an agreement executed by the separate Alliance board of 12 members made up of both OMC and JH Boards, where each entity, regardless of the different number of board members, had equal decision-making power.

We were satisfied that:

1. The independent authority over governance and operations of each entity would be preserved,

2. That if we were selected as a partner, any negotiations between OMC and JH would involve open and thorough community involvement,

3. That there would be no binding agreement of any kind without full community input and a public Board vote,

4. JH could benefit tremendously from such an alliance, and

5. This alliance could result in two independent medical centers providing a strong, viable health care system that allowed patients on the entire North Olympic Peninsula to receive excellent primary and specialty care without leaving our area.

In a retreat workshop of our JH Board in 2024, we hired Rex Burgdorfer from Juniper Advisory, the same person and company working with OMC, to give us an overview of how partnerships and alliances can be formed by public hospital districts. We knew that closer relationships with other healthcare entities would likely be necessary for financial stability in order to preserve our governance independence, and mentioned a possible alliance during our JH Strategic Planning Roadshow in 2024. With the now obvious challenges we will face from funding cuts at both the federal and state levels, this potential Alliance seemed like a benefit for both JH and OMC for increasing our collective bargaining, purchasing and contracting power, not to mention sharing of services to avoid redundancy.

Commissioner Ready accused us of silencing and muting him during several meetings. Using Robert’s Rules of Order, some of us attempted to limit the time Commissioner Ready was able to speak at board meetings. We were concerned that the more he revealed publicly what the rest of us thought was appropriately confidential information, the more it would jeopardize the acceptance of the Alliance proposal by OMC.

Our proposal is no longer being considered, and revealing its content prematurely may have contributed to this lost opportunity. We regret the early disclosure of the Alliance proposal and that it caused significant distress for OMC and their citizens/residents, and we hope that we can mend some of that in the near future.

Jefferson Healthcare is a Public Hospital District. Residents in Jefferson County have the ultimate control over what we do when they vote for the five Commissioners on the Board. With the hospital and many service clinics, we are one of the very few healthcare entities in the state that did not lose money during the years of the COVID pandemic.

Our success is mostly due to Mike Glenn’s leadership focused on growth and expansion of services that our community needs. All of this at virtually no cost to the public since annual property taxes pay for less than one day of the services we provide.  We will definitely need to find more funding in the near future and explore more partnership opportunities. We will definitely keep the public appropriately informed as best we can.