Leader at MLK medical center is out
She leaves her Willowbrook post under unclear circumstances a week after the L.A. County healthcare director resigned.
Antionette Smith Epps, who was brought in to help save Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center but wound up instead presiding over its closing, left Friday, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services officials said.
The county characterized Smith Epps' departure as a resignation, saying in a brief statement that she wanted "to pursue other career opportunities."
However, she received a severance package equal to one year's pay, according to department spokesman Michael Wilson, and the circumstances surrounding her departure were unclear.
Smith Epps' departure is the latest in a string of recent setbacks in the county's beleaguered public healthcare system. Last week department director Dr. Bruce A. Chernof resigned, and negotiations with a private entity to reopen King-Harbor collapsed.
The facility's name now is Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center. It provides outpatient services.
County supervisors are to meet behind closed doors Tuesday to discuss ways to reopen the hospital, which had been renamed King-Harbor shortly before its closing.
They cite an exemption to the state's open-meetings law as the basis for keeping their deliberations out of the public eye. The exemption allows governments to discuss negotiating points in pending real estate transactions in private.
Supervisors claimed the same exemption during an earlier session on the hospital, when they were advised that real estate covenants surrounding the facility prevented them from selling the property outright and would make it difficult to lease it to a for-profit entity, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
That news led supervisors to lengthy deliberations over a way to entice the University of California to run a reopened hospital, the person said.
"I think this steps over the line," said Terry Franke, general counsel of Californians Aware, an organization that advocates open government. "It's not often in my experience that a public agency will dispense with the whole basis of the closed session to go about talking about prospects for a deal without having someone [with whom] they are actually negotiating."
County Counsel Raymond G. Fortner Jr. said that the closed-door discussion was appropriate and that it was limited strictly to the terms of a real estate agreement with publicly disclosed suitors. County supervisors have publicly said, however, that the only viable candidate to take over King-Harbor -- Pacific Hospital of Long Beach -- has since pulled out of talks.
