“We paid that building off.”
At last Thursday’s April 7th Rotary Club of Uvalde meeting at the Uvalde Country Club, Uvalde Memorial Hospital CEO Tom Norwick responded to a full page, full color ad placed in the previous Sunday’s issue of the Uvalde Leader-News paid for by Richard Williams and Don McLaughlin Jr.
The title of the ad read, “SAVE THIS BUILDING” which referred to the old Uvalde Memorial Hospital buildings the new UMH Hospital Building replaced. The ad also included pictures of the UMH board members with their respective names and phone numbers.
Norwick stated the hospital board carefully considered the fate of the old hospital building.
He began his remarks by saying,
“You would have had asbestos removal. There was just a litany of things. We moved the chiller, the cooling towers to the new building and the emergency power plant. The cost to utilize that for a healthcare facility, again, would be extensive. I don’t know a hundred people that would be wanting to rent a bunch of offices to move into that or how you would pay a half a million dollars in utilities to maintain that building.” Nordwick said.
“It wasn’t on a whim we said, ‘Hey, new is better than old, let’s knock it down.’ and didn’t think about alternative uses; we did. We just couldn’t come up with a viable option to where it just wouldn’t be an anchor around our neck and from a perspective of having to maintain an old building that really couldn’t be used to its fullest. The newest part of the building (referring to the old hospital building) is 50 years old. We had a good chunk of it that was built in 1949. I know there are some people think, ‘Well, There’s got to be a way to save it and we’ve got to make use of monies.’” Norwick said.
“Yes, we received some sales tax funding. But I can tell you that’s amounted to about a million dollars a year. We probably do 15 million dollars in charity care every year. That doesn’t even begin to cover our costs. So yes, we’re appreciative of those tax dollars; don’t get me wrong.”
He went on to say, “This board of directors has not mismanaged the operations of this facility. They’ve done an excellent job.”
“We went out and borrowed money to get this thing off the ground. I’ve not announced this publicly before, but we actually made the decision not to take the loan: We paid that building off.”
Norwick concluded by saying: “This is not an organization that has put a huge tax burden on this community.”
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