When Powerful Institutions Help Choose Their Overseers (Opinion)

PALM SPRINGS —I spent the first part of my career in banking. Later, I moved into nonprofit leadership and public service.

Those worlds taught me something that should not be controversial: corporations have interests, and they are entitled to advocate for them. Nonprofits have interests. Labor has interests. So do patients, taxpayers and neighborhoods.

The problem begins when the interests with the most money or institutional power push everyone else away from the table.

That is why a recent campaign-finance filing caught my attention.

I am one of three candidates running for the Zone 1 seat on the Desert Healthcare District Board. A newly registered political committee identifies Desert Regional Medical Center as its sponsor and names candidates in three separate District races, including one of my Zone 1 opponents, C.J. Tobe.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean.

I have no evidence that Tobe or the other candidates coordinated with this committee, knew about it beforehand or did anything improper. Independent political activity is legal, and institutions have every right to participate in elections.

But voters have every right to ask questions about that participation.

Voters should ask whether a hospital operator with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in its relationship with a public district should also be helping choose the directors who oversee that relationship.

The Desert Healthcare District is not an advisory group. It owns major public assets, including the Desert Regional Medical Center campus. Tenet Healthcare operates the hospital under a long-term agreement with the District. Decisions involving that relationship affect hundreds of millions of dollars in public resources and the future of healthcare throughout the Coachella Valley.

That makes Desert Regional different from an ordinary organization endorsing a candidate.

The hospital operator is helping elect people to a public board with responsibilities directly connected to the hospital it operates.

We have seen this before.

In 2016, Tenet publicly recommended three candidates for the Desert Healthcare District Board. At the time, the board was approaching consequential decisions about who would operate Desert Regional after the existing lease expired. Tenet said it was supporting candidates it believed would best serve its employees, physicians and patients.

Tenet was entitled to make that argument.

Voters were equally entitled to ask whose interests District directors would protect when those interests diverged.

That remains the right question today.

The point is not that the candidates Tenet supported necessarily failed the public. It is that the potential tension between institutional interests and public oversight was apparent then, just as it is now.

I learned something similar when I served as a trustee and treasurer of the Palm Springs Public Library Board. A trustee does not merely support an institution. A trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to understand the assets entrusted to the board and ask how they are being managed.

When I joined that board, I wanted to understand how the library’s endowment was accounted for and whether the library was receiving the income it was due. That was not hostility toward City Hall. It was the job.

Public stewardship sometimes requires cooperation. Sometimes it requires skepticism. Usually it requires both.

The same principle applies to healthcare.

Desert Regional is indispensable to this community. A responsible Desert Healthcare District director should want the hospital to succeed and should be capable of working productively with its leadership.

But partnership is not deference.

A director must also be prepared to enforce agreements, question assumptions, scrutinize financial arrangements and say no when the District’s interests and the hospital operator’s interests are not the same.

That is why the source of political support matters even when no law has been broken.

Every candidate can promise independence. The more useful question for voters is whether the structure surrounding that candidate gives them confidence that independence will survive when a difficult decision arrives.

Political parties and other endorsing organizations should ask the same question. Their endorsement should mean more than that a candidate performed well in an interview. It should reflect some understanding of the significant interests working to put that candidate in office.

None of this requires us to exclude corporate interests from public life.

My years in banking taught me that businesses have legitimate objectives and often bring expertise, capital and discipline that communities need. My years in nonprofits and public service have taught me something equally important: those interests cannot be allowed to crowd the public out of decisions about public assets.

There should always be a chair at the table for business.

There must never be so many corporate chairs that the public is left standing.

The Desert Healthcare District belongs to the people who created it, fund it and depend on it.

Whoever wins these elections should remember who gets the first seat at the table.