Candidate Profile: David McCormick, challenger for commissioner District No. 3

Challenger David McCormick was raised in Ritzville, and in more than one manner, has made a life of giving back to the city. He seeks to add one more commitment to his list, vying for election to Adams County Public Hospital District No. 2’s commissioner District No. 3, which carries a six-year term.

The 1976 graduate of Ritzville High School is the chief of police for the City of Ritzville. He serves as the chairman of the commissioners for Adams County Fire Protection District No. 1, an elected position.

During the past 33 years, McCormick has accumulated 2,600 hours of law enforcement education and training. He has been police chief for the city for 19 years and employed by the city for 24 years.

At the age of 53, McCormick has lived in the district for 51 years.

He and his partner, Michelle Asmussen, live just outside the city with their youngest daughter, Samantha. Their oldest daughter Tiffany lives in Spokane, McCormick’s daughter, Katie, is married and completing her fourth year of college at the University of Montana. Brittanie Asmussen is currently attending Spokane Community College.

McCormick has served as a member of the Ritzville Volunteer Fire Department for 28 years, including terms as president, treasurer and board member.

He has also been a Ritzville Lions Club member for 19 years, including a term as president.

The United States Secret Service Plaque of Appreciation was presented to McCormick for identifying a murder suspect and locating evidence, which resulted in a homicide conviction. Twice he has been honored for life-saving efforts while in the line of duty.

McCormick is self-funding his campaign.

“I am not representing any special interest groups and will only be obligated to the citizen taxpayers of this hospital district,” he said.

As a long-time community leader, McCormick said he opted to run for the hospital board because he feels capable of providing good leadership.

“After listening to and reading about the public’s discontent with the hospital board’s recent direction and decisions, I felt like I might be the one to make a difference,” he said.

McCormick said there are several reasons why he would be a good commissioner.

“I have developed negotiations skills through my experience as a police officer and working with a public entity budget process for 20 years. I have experience being a leader, an employer and a respected public figure,” he said. “I have successfully operated a part-time farming venture for the past seven years, acquiring several smaller parcels of farm land, both leased and owned.

“I have been able to show a profit in my farming venture, manage my finances very well and consider myself a successful part-time business owner.”

He also feels there are several specific things to accomplish in an effort to preserve healthcare locally.

“At this time I feel the hospital district must focus on securing physician(s) to become a part of our community. This physician(s) must live in the hospital district and become an active member of our community,” he said.

“The focus on moving forward with a new hospital facility must not be a priority at this time. I will strongly suggest the existing hospital be evaluated from top to bottom with a list of needed upgrades prioritized. The district currently has the funds to make the necessary upgrades. The priority must be restoring the public’s trust in our hospital district and continuing to provide quality medical care and fully staffed ambulance service to our citizens 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The following are McCormick’s responses during a recent interview with The Journal.

As fire commissioner, what challenges have you faced in terms of moving the district forward?

“The reason I filed for that position is because, as you know, I’d been on the fire department, at the time I was elected, for 25 years. And I admire what the last board of commissioners did by being able to build the fire station that we have now without raising taxes or going to a special bond.

“But by doing that they depleted the reserves that we had and we had no money in reserves to upgrade trucks. And we needed to upgrade a tanker and then move forward with purchasing a couple of new brush trucks. The challenge that was presented there was to inform the public what we were going to do with the (levy) funds. I took pictures of the trucks we were going to replace. I took pictures of the volunteer firemen and put together a two page informational flyer and we sent that to every voter, every residence that had a voter in it in the fire district so they knew exactly why we were doing it. By educating the public we received an overwhelming response to the special levy they passed. We started almost immediately with acquiring a chassis and using one of our old tanks and building a new tanker. We have one brush truck that was delivered, I believe in February of this year, and we’ve ordered a second one.”

What have you done about rebuilding the reserves?

“After our third year of collecting the taxes we will have paid for our upgraded equipment. The fourth year tax money will go into our reserve fund. So we will be able to carry a reserve, which we hadn’t been since they used the reserves to build the station.”

McCormick estimated the district will be able to carry a reserve of $200,000 to $300,000.

As police chief, a volunteer firefighter, part-time farmer and an elected fire district commissioner, how will you balance all of that with this new job?

“My first priority is to the City of Ritzville as a police chief. Sometimes that’s a 9 to 5 job but most of the time it’s not. If there’s an emergency situation that I need to respond to, whether I am on duty or not, I will do that. Over the course of nearly four years as a fire commissioner that requirement has not presented itself to be a conflict with any meeting that we have had.

“Farming is my lowest priority. I do have some landlords. But that isn’t something you can’t do tomorrow or the next day. But responding to an emergency situation is something you have to do now. And being an active member of the fire department is also something that requires an immediate response but I don’t respond to every accident call or every medical call. If your house is on fire, your wheat field on fire, I’m going to the fire.

“But the likelihood of that occurring during a hospital board meeting is very small. And I know this is going to take an added amount of time researching and being involved with committee meetings that won’t always be able to be scheduled around how my schedule works. I feel that I’ll be able to take the time off from the city to adequately represent my position on the board if I am elected.”

In your responses to our questionnaire you mentioned making some suggestions, what were they?

“Actually, I probably didn’t word it right in my message to you. It concerns me greatly that the CEO makes the kind of money that he does, not that he doesn’t deserve it, or that it isn’t industry standard level, but that, that person doesn’t live in the hospital district and does not pay taxes in our district with that money.

“As I understand it, there’s stipend pay for travel. As a police chief, if I hire a police officer to work for the City of Ritzville that person is expected and required to live within a 10-minute emergency response of the city, which can entail up to five miles outside of the city limits.

“Have a position open and its here in these communities, the district boundaries, I would expect those employees to live within the district boundaries. I do understand that you couldn’t require a part-time employee to live within the boundaries.”

Is it all right with you that so many administrative level employees live outside the district?

“No, it’s not all right with me. And I have expressed that to different board members and have been told that’s industry standard to not require people to live within the boundaries. It doesn’t set well with me that these kind of tax dollars are being spent on employees that don’t live in our district. If they don’t live here they don’t support our businesses as much as they would if they did live here and they are not paying taxes that are going back into our district. I have brought that up to two board members. Just because I brought it up doesn’t mean they are going to go change it. That was a concern of mine that I have brought up.”

Could the contract process with the doctors been handled better?

“I think there was a way that the end result, if the end result was going to be the same, it could have been reached in a different fashion. The negotiations, as I understand it, still aren’t public. At this point in time I’m not aware of the hospital boards’ offers and final stance and the doctors’ negotiations, response and final stance.

“It has completely torn our communities apart. It’s devastating for the financial outlook for the hospital. We are constantly in the news. And it doesn’t appear it’s slowing down or going to stop any time soon. It is negative for our community.

“I’d like to have more information on what the offers were, what we have is a generalization.

“If physicians were hired to be physicians they need to focus on being physicians and then let the CEO and the board be politically involved. And from my observations that’s not what was happening and I think that was part of the problem. I hated to see it. But I think it was inevitable with the stance the board was taking and the stance the physicians were taking. If there was a way to heal it or go back, I’m sure everybody involved would have wanted to do that including the physicians. Look at how hard they are working at their own business now, the number of hours. If they had been doing that while they were employed at the district they would have been making a ton more money.

“I do understand the major stumbling block was a no compete clause. I don’t know that the no compete clause should have been a part of the negotiations. Because they have been working here for 20 years and 16 years and that hadn’t been an issue before. If you’re going to hire a new physician and bring them on board, make that a part of their contract. You can change, in my opinion, their salary and some terms and conditions of their contract but if a no compete clause is such a big deal, it should have been done a long time ago. As I understand, as far back as nine years ago it was discussed and the CEOs didn’t want to touch it.”

What about the language regarding termination without cause?

“There aren’t too many at-will employees out there in the public sector. Even in my position, I am hired and fired by the mayor but the council has to ratify that decision. So if I have a bad day or a bad week or the mayor has a bad day or bad week the mayor doesn’t come in and clean house based on an incident that occurred that you disagreed on.

“But if there’s a long history and documented problems and termination needs to take place, the council would ratify that. In this case if the CEO comes to work one day and just had enough he could just say ‘look, you’re done, you’re out of here.’ I just don’t think that’s right. You or I wouldn’t accept terms of employment like that.”

Are you comfortable with the manner in which the board responds to and treats the community?

“No I am not. And I brought this to two different board members also. It’s like they don’t want to accommodate the community or the people who attend the board meetings. It seems like they want to make things difficult and in a lot of circumstances mislead the public. Things that have occurred recently that I have disagreed with are the strategic plan that was not made public in its entirety. And it’s like, why are you not posting this whole thing on the website so the community can read every part of it. What are you trying to hide, why?”

McCormick said the process for the strategic plan was moving too quickly. And when the commissioners first agreed to accept public comment, at first they didn’t even allow enough time to receive the comment, consider it and perhaps include it in the plan.

“It’s like they’re placating the public and giving them the appearance they are concerned and want their input but they don’t. In this case, they didn’t have the forethought to say ‘what are we going to do with it when we get it?’ Why take the time to have public input if you’re not going to do something with it?

“It just continues, the things the board does, the decisions they make in my opinion continue to give the public reason to question what they are doing.”

Is this a good time to implement a new five-year plan?

“I don’t think at this point in time that the current board should take action on implementing the strategic plan because there’s a possibility of up to three new members on that board and for sure there will be at least one new member on the board so the direction the board might take after the first year could be completely different than the direction the current board may take now. If the new board isn’t focused on the same things with the same priorities there’s a possibility they may come in and undo and change what has taken quite a bit of time and money to implement.”

Is the board doing a good job of listening to the community?

“They were making progress. They were moving forward. People were starting to want to regain their trust in the board and then, now look what you’ve done. How long can you keep telling people that you’re trying to keep them informed, you’re not trying to keep secrets from them, you want input, you want them involved but the actions that board takes would lead you to believe that’s just the opposite?

“I understand that when you elect a board, that board has the ultimate decision, but the people who elect the board have a reasonable expectation that their concerns need to be considered by the board. I believe you have the obligation to come forward with the ideas and the information that’s being relayed to you by the voters and the taxpayers and the citizens in the communities in the district. I just don’t think that happens as much as it should. I’m not saying that everybody that comes in and voices a concern or complains should get their way.”

Should the district pursue expanding its boundaries to include Sprague?

“I don’t know what the benefit to the hospital district would be other than to increase the tax base. I think that if Sprague wants a clinic, a part time clinic in Sprague like the district provided to Lind and Washtucna, they could approach the hospital district and it might be a good idea.

“Then again as I understand it, since they have operated, the Lind and Washtucna clinics have always been in the red, not in the black. Other than the tax base that they would acquire, I don’t know the reason why they would want to do that.”

Previously the commissioners opposed a national search for a new CEO because it would cost $25,000. They have since spent substantially more than that on lawyers and consultants. Should they have conducted a more aggressive search for a CEO?

“I have never been involved with a hospital district before. I don’t know what the costs involved are other than what I read in the paper. I am not familiar with the processes they take to research and recruit employees. In my opinion $25,000 is a drop in the bucket to fill a CEO position if the salary that you are going to pay is $140,000 plus the stipend pay and whatever else that position is entitled to.

“I think it would have been a wise investment to spend the $25,000 to do the search.”

How would you improve the relationship between the district and community?

“I would want to keep the public better informed on what the board is doing. The public has the impression that the hospital board is always trying to hide things and to do things without the public’s knowledge.

“I would like to be able to better inform the public of what the plans were to move forward with decisions that are being made. When I got elected to the fire commission, I’m the one that took the bull by the horns, and it was an easy bull, and informed the public and asked for their blessing. And then let them know what we’ve done, how their money is being spent. It’s with their approval. I think the way I approached that would be how I would like to approach this position if I’m elected.

“The public isn’t going to be happy with all of the decisions that are made. If you have the people who are in the board meetings complaining all the time over every decision you make. They are either misrepresenting the entire community or the rest of the community is remaining quiet and letting them be the ones who are vocal.”

What would you look

for in a new physician?

“I would want a physician that would want to come to this community and be a part of this community. Be actively involved in social aspects as well as being a part of the community, not just coming here for a job. They need to be able to be personable, to have friends, to walk down the street and talk to people. We have to be able to trust and that’s going to take awhile, our new physicians. People have a trust in Marty and Valerie. You can’t just come here from Spokane or from Wenatchee and work an eight hour shift and leave. That will never develop.”

Your father served the hospital board until the end of 2007. Are you running for election to carry on his work?

“Chuck is my father. Probably, my closest friend. But we have disagreed more in the last 10 years in discussions we’ve had about the hospital district. If people think that I am running for this position because I have my father’s unfinished business to finish, they are wrong.

“If they think that my dad tells me what to do, he’s been having trouble telling me what to do since I was 12 years old. We spend a lot of time together but there’s nothing we disagree on more than our views on the hospital district.”

Kirk Danekas was your boss when he served as mayor. How about your relationship with him?

“He was my boss as the mayor. And Kirk and I were very close friends for a number of years and socialized frequently in the past. I have a respect for Kirk and I know he respects me, but that doesn’t mean we agree on everything. My reasons for running for this position don’t have anything to do with my friendship with Kirk. I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that I’m doing this because of Kirk Danekas or because of Chuck McCormick.”

Where do you stand on the concept of building a new hospital?

“I am not in favor of moving forward with a new hospital. I am not in favor of moving forward with purchasing the land at this time.”

Any closing comments?

“It would be nice if the people that were out there campaigning would campaign for their chosen candidate and not negatively campaign against another candidate. If their candidate is the best one they should be out there selling that candidate. I think they have a problem if their focus is making false statements about another candidate.

“Different people have come to me and told me that I was personally recruited to run for this position by Mark Barglof. They are being told that I want to build a new hospital and those are the two statements that are misleading. There’s absolutely no truth to them.”