Arkansas Children's Hospital's correspondence with state Medicaid officials about the property tax allotment the hospital gets from Pulaski County must be disclosed under the state Freedom of Information Act, Circuit Judge Tim Fox ruled Friday.
The hospital's designation as a private nonprofit charity does not automatically shield it from the state's open-records law, Fox said.
The documents, already publicly available from Medicaid, must be released by the hospital because the law that established the tax collection gives Children's control of the money, the judge ruled.
In 2016, county property owners paid about $3.8 million, at a rate of about about 60 cents for every $1,000 of property value, under a hospital-maintenance tax approved by voters in 1978.
But since 2001, the hospital has opted not to receive the money directly but instead have it deposited in the state's Medicaid account, where it's used to match federal Medicaid contributions that can generate a 3-to-1 return on the tax money.
Fox's ruling was in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the hospital by community activist Dee Blakley.
But it was a narrow win for Blakley, whose attorney, Lucien Gillham, had argued that Children's should be forced to comply more broadly with the open-records law because of the public funding the hospital receives, including through a partnership with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
This lawsuit, filed earlier this month, was the second time Blakley sued under the open-records law when Children's officials have refused to provide her with an accounting of how the hospital is spending the money it receives from the county.
Her first lawsuit, filed in 2015, was unsuccessful at forcing Children's to disclose financial records after hospital officials testified that they didn't have the kind of accounting documentation Blakley had asked for.
Last month at a trial over another issue raised in that lawsuit -- whether the county had exerted appropriate supervision over the hospital's tax allotment -- the judge cleared county officials of wrongdoing.
In his ruling siding with the county, the judge noted that the tax allotment amounts to less than 1 percent of the hospital's annual operating costs and would barely cover the costs of running Children's for three days.
Blakley is appealing that ruling.
Metro on 05/27/2017