HOBOKEN – An agreement has been announced between the creditors and Hudson Healthcare Inc., the operator of Hoboken University Medical Center, likely paving the way for the sale of the city owned hospital to HUMC Holdco, an ownership group from Bayonne Medical Center.
Mayor Dawn Zimmer sent out a press release shortly before 8 p.m. announcing the agreement. The bankruptcy had to be settled before the sale could be completed, and Zimmer said earlier on Wednesday that if an agreement wasn’t reached by the hearing on Thursday afternoon, the hospital would be closed.
The settlement proposed earlier on Wednesday approves approximately $10 million on $34 million in claims.
“This approval by the creditors committee is a major milestone for everyone who’s been working for the past few months to bring this transaction to a positive conclusion,” Zimmer said. “I want to thank members of the Hoboken Municipal Hospital Authority (HMHA), as well as Hoboken Healthcare Inc. (HHI) who have worked tirelessly with the city to get this deal done.”
The City Council voted to guarantee $52 million in bonds to save the hospital in 2007, but a major goal of Zimmer’s administration has been to relieve the taxpayers of the bond guarantee by selling the hospital to a private owner to keep the facility as an acute care hospital. HUMC Holdco has pledged to keep the hospital as an acute care facility for a period of at least seven years.
Zimmer also targeted the nurse’s union JNESO, which filed an objection to the settlement on Wednesday afternoon.
“We believe this objection contains allegations that are totally without merit,” Zimmer said. “In fact, JNESO’s court filing seems to be an unusual course of action considering the fact that of the 314 JNESO members who have already applied for positions at HUMC under the management of Holdco, 285 have been offered positions. That’s 91 percent.”
Zimmer said in a statement that she is “confident that nothing in its filing will prevent approval of the settlement agreement or the sale agreement.”
Virginia Treacy, the executive director of JNESO, denied that filing an objection was an attempt to “derail the sale.”
“We believe that there has been a concerted campaign to hold the community, the vendors and the employees hostages to the sale which has been surrounded by misinformation and secrecy,” Treacy said in a release on Wednesday, which accompanied the objection.
However, with a vote by the creditors committee to approve the settlement and sale, the transaction took a major leap toward the finish line of a sale. The only obstacle left in the sale is the approval of the state Commissioner of Health in the form of a Certificate of Need. The sale was unanimously approved in early August by the state health Planning Board.
For more on the hospital issue, keep reading HudsonReporter.com. – Ray Smith
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