Some Windsor residents want out of Healdsburg District Hospital taxes

John Martin has no problem paying taxes and municipal bonds to support schools, roads and other public services. The Windsor resident says it’s his civic duty.

What troubles him, however, is having to pay a $150 parcel tax each year for a Healdsburg hospital he says he doesn’t use. Healdsburg and its residents should be able to support the facility on their own, Martin said.

“To me it isn’t the $150 … it’s the idea that our property tax is going to another city and paying for services they need,” said Martin, a retired software consultant.

Martin is one of number of outspoken Windsor residents who have been raising the issue of late and calling on Windsor council members to discuss a step called “detachment,” whereby the town’s parcels would be removed from taxing area that supports Healdsburg District Hospital, the 43-bed facility whose service region takes in a large swath of northern Sonoma County.

Proponents of detachment, which faces a number of bureaucratic hurdles, contend that residents of Windsor are much more inclined to use larger health care facilities to the south, including Sutter Health’s new Santa Rosa hospital and Kaiser Permanente.

Nancy Cordova, a Kaiser Permanente member, is another Windsor retiree who has taken issue with the parcel tax to support the Healdsburg hospital.

“There’s no circumstance where I would use Healdsburg hospital yet I’m paying the parcel tax on it,” Cordova said.

The tax protest has been advanced by Martin and others before the Windsor Town Council recently. The calls echo a similar movement by some residents of the Russian River corridor to lobby for detachment from the taxing district for the former Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol. The twice-bankrupt facility is soon to reopen in a different format as Sonoma West Medical Center.

In both cases, hospital officials say the wider taxing districts - formed in 2001 for the Healdsburg hospital and 2000 for Palm Drive in Sebastopol - are critical to sustaining services in the smaller facilities, which for years functioned as frontline care centers for thousands of county residents. Palm Drive supporters, especially, used that argument last year in lobbying for keeping the facility open in some form.

For their part, Healdsburg District Hospital officials have strongly rejected the claim that few Windsor residents use the Healdsburg facility, which also serves residents in Geyserville, Cloverdale and other north Sonoma County communities.

Healdsburg hospital CEO Nancy Schmid said the hospital logged 8,745 inpatient and outpatient visits from Windsor residents in 2014. Total patient visits at the hospital last year amounted to 57,822.

“Windsor does use this hospital,” Schmid said.

But Ann Galbraith, who lives in Windsor’s Brooks Creek subdivision for seniors, said many of her neighbors are either Kaiser members or go to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the county’s largest, with 278 beds.

“$150 dollars on my property taxes for something I’ve never used is a bit much,” Galbraith said in an email. “Why would I ever go to the Healdsburg hospital when Sutter is much closer?” She repeated a call for Windsor to be removed from the North Sonoma County Healthcare District.

Such a process would require approval by the Sonoma County Local Area Formation Committee, which regulates the boundaries of cities and special districts.

It is a process that could be initiated by the hospital district’s board of directors - an unlikely scenario - or through a voter petition by those who live in the area seeking detachment.

Martin said he’s gone before the Windsor Town Council three times recently to ask that the issue of detachment be placed on the agenda. He said council members have told him they are not allowed to publicly comment on items or issues not on the agenda.

“This should be a top priority,” Martin said. “Our property tax should be spent locally, that’s what it’s for. It’s for our high schools, our roads, our library, our parks and recreation. Not for a hospital in some town up the street.”

Windsor Mayor Bruce Okrepkie said in an interview that the Town Council has no say in the matter because the hospital district is not under their jurisdiction.

Parcel taxes paid by Windsor residents amount to more than $1 million to support the Healdsburg District Hospital. Overall, the hospital’s healthcare district gets about $3 million in parcel taxes, a key revenue behind government reimbursements through Medicare and payments by private insurance.

Supervisor James Gore, whose district includes much of northern Sonoma County, said he is scheduled to meet with Martin to discuss the issue. Gore said Martin’s concerns are “valid” but the supervisor said he needs to examine the issue further.

“John and other residents are raising some good questions. I look forward to having those discussions,” he said.

Gore said that he has discussed with Schmid the hospital’s role in Windsor and plans to expand services to the town’s residents. He said that while Sutter’s new location, off Mark West Springs Road on Santa Rosa’s northern outskirts, may have changed the geography of hospital admissions and outpatient visits, the Healdsburg hospital has recently reported more business.

Schmid confirmed that in the first quarter of 2015, visits to the hospital’s emergency department rose 12.3 percent compared with the same period last year. She said in that same period, hospital admissions through the emergency department were up 16 percent compared with the previous year.

Schmid also advanced a claim made by supporters of Sonoma West Medical Center - that patients visiting the emergency department at the new Sutter hospital are experiencing very long wait times.

“Here in Healdsburg, we get you in within 15 minutes,” she said.

Schmid said the Healdsburg hospital’s ties to Windsor go beyond patient visits. Nearly 12 percent of the employees at the hospital live in Windsor, including herself. The largest share, 40 percent, live in Santa Rosa. Only 20 percent of the employees live in Healdsburg, she said.

Martin said that when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Windsor Times earlier this year outlining his call for detachment he was flooded with emails of support.

He said he wants Windsor residents to be given the opportunity to publicly discuss the matter.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.