Stephens Co. Hospital Still Working on Financing

The Stephens County Hospital Authority continues to work on getting everything together to borrow up to $15 million in long-term bonds.

Monday night, the Hospital Authority met for its monthly meeting.

Hospital Administrator Lynne Anderson said that the hospital is hard at work on both its short-term loan and long-term bond financing.

“We have worked on the loan documents and the intergovernmental agreement that we would have for the county to back the loan and so we are hopeful we will get the $5 million loan closed in the next week,” said Anderson. “We had our bond representative here tonight to talk about different options with the bond because close behind the loan, we will try to get the long-term bonds issued.”

The Stephens County Hospital Authority is looking to borrow $15 million in bonds for the hospital, $5 million of which would initially be a short term loan borrowed by the hospital and backed by the county. The county would also back the bonds.

The Hospital Authority told the county commission at a called meeting last month that the initial $5 million loan would help cover immediate operational costs. Meanwhile, another $3.8 million of that $15 million would be re-financing of current hospital bonds, leaving the hospital the rest to invest in technology, equipment, office space and other needs that the hospital said it needs to try and be more profitable.

Hospital officials said the financing gives the hospital time to continue to work on things and also examine all of its options.

Meanwhile on Monday, the Hospital Authority reported that the hospital had another month of losses in the financial column in February.

Anderson said those losses are due to more of the same factors on the revenue side.

“We have lower reimbursement than we used to, so we have greater contractuals,” said Anderson. “This month was actually less of a loss than last month, but still a long way from where we need to be.”

Anderson said the hospital is working on trying to be as efficient as possible on the expenditure side in an effort to keep costs down as much as possible.