Kino bonds passing easily
by Sheryl Kornman on May. 16, 2006, under Elections, Local
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry celebrates the passage of county bond issues on Tuesday night.
County voters Tuesday overwhelmingly approved issuing $66 million in bonds to build a 100-bed acute-care psychiatric hospital and a stand-alone outpatient psychiatric urgent care facility.
Both would be on the campus of UPH Hospital at Kino at 2800 E. Ajo Way.
With 74 percent of precincts reporting, questions 3 and 4 were passing 64 percent to 36 percent.
The $66 million in bonds will be added to $4 million in bonds approved by voters in 2004 to build the new psychiatric hospital on the Kino campus.
UPH Hospital at Kino will operate the new psychiatric hospital.
The new outpatient urgent care psychiatric center on the UPH Hospital campus would be a freestanding facility located near the main hospital and psychiatric hospital.
It would be the city’s first psychiatric urgent care facility and its operator is expected to be a consortium of local nonprofit behavioral health providers.
Neal Cash, CEO of the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, which oversees those providers, called voter support in this election for the psychiatric facilities “tremendous. Absolutely outstanding.”
Cash said the bond election campaign partly funded by CPSA was a grassroots effort.
He said people understood the issues on the ballot, including improved public transportation and road improvements, “impact the whole community.”
“I really think the constituency we we brought out clearly supported all four questions,” Cash said.
“Now the work starts,” he said.
John Kromko, who opposed the psychiatric facilities, said he is “upset that the county won’t open up the bidding process.”
That, however, is not true.
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said any health care facility can bid on the psychiatric outpatient facility.
“I hate to see public funds to go to a private corporation,” he said. UPH is a private, nonprofit corporation.
