The Scurry County Hospital District’s board learned Cogdell Memorial Hospital’s 2021 budget reflects a deficit of about $3.87 million deficit when they met Wednesday morning.
The hospital’s total budgeted revenues for 2021 are $36,510,655, while total operating expenses are budgeted at $41,972,594 and total non-operating factors are budgeted at a $1,593,281 surplus, for a net loss of $3,868,658.
“If you look, (the deficit) ties basically to depreciation,” said Chief Financial Officer John Everett. “The other thing is, if you look at our ad valorem taxes in here, they’re down. We going to budget those from the sample of what we estimate to actually receive, about $2 million less due to (appeals of) the Appraisal District lawsuit with Kinder Morgan.”
The projected $3.8 million deficit follows a projected $3.7 million deficit this year. In 2019, the district showed $481,564 in net income.
The board also heard an audit of its 2019 financials during the meeting, presented by certified public accountant Aaron L. Milligan of Durbin and Co. LLP of Waco.
The audit indicated that the district’s total net position improved by about $500,000 from $38.1 million in 2018 to $37.6 million in 2019. The gain continued an upward trend from the beginning of 2018.
The audit doesn’t reflect the financial problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred after the start of 2020.
“You received an unmodified opinion, the cleanest opinion you can receive,” Milligan said. “We’re talking about December numbers here.”
In other business, Shelby Bufkin, owner of Chem-Pac Chemical Sales and Service Company in Snyder, asked the the board to approve installation of hiking/bicycle trails on land owned by the hospital.
“There’s a big group of us that ride over here on the (Western Texas College) bike trail and nature trail, and there’s the land that y’all have right adjacent to the north of it. We would like to try to utilize that land to extend that trail system. We’ve got about 2.5 miles around that loop that we ride, and there’s a large number of us that ride, a lot of guys that work here at the hospital. What we’d like to, everything would be funded through companies like mine, Chem-Pac, and a couple of other companies for all the expenses to build the trail and to put up any necessary signage and anything like that.”
Bufkin said the expanded trail system would be a healthy activity for the entire community.
Since expanding the trail was not on the agenda, there was no vote. Members of the board suggested putting it on the agenda for next month’s meeting.
Dr. David Kerr announced new appointments and re-appointments. New appointments included Dr. Tanner Evans; Eric Babb, D.O., of Envision; and Drs. Michael Berven, Frederick Jones, Dishant Shah, Qazi Uddin and Anthony Willis, all of Direct Radiology. The sole re-appointment was Dr. Richard Okafor in the hospital’s orthopedic department.
The board approved two new procedures, including a payroll procedure and a voluntary separation procedure. A policy regarding paid and earned time off for hospital employees was tabled until a future meeting.