NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The North Kansas City Hospital is being put up for sale and a lot of people are upset about it. The city council and mayor caught a lot of people by surprise with the announcement, including the hospital leadership.
Tuesday night, the city approved a one million dollar contract with Merryl Lynch, which will investigate a sale or merger of the city owned hospital. No one from the city returned FOX 4’s calls, but a source says the city wants to sell because as a city owned property the hospital doesn’t generate tax revenue. That changes if the hospital becomes privately owned.
Several people FOX 4 spoke to said they’re angry about the way the city handled this. Elizabeth Short is a former mayor of North Kansas City, and says she doesn’t understand why this was pushed through so quickly, without input from the citizens.
“The people on the hospital board were not contacted, and they learned about it reading the agenda on the internet,” she said. “It’s an outrage, an absolute outrage.”
Short says people like her care so much about this because it really is a community hospital. Back in the 50s, the city decided it needed a hospital, because there weren’t any north of the river. People held chili suppers and bake sales to raise the first thousand dollars for the hospital.
The hospital director told FOX 4 he couldn’t talk to us yet because he didn’t know anything about the potential sale. He was going to be meeting with the city in a closed session Wednesday night.