The Forbes Legacy: A Master Illusionist

I was extremely active when Geri Forbes arrived from Florida to take over leadership of our community hospital.

She assumed her post in April 2015. I was a candidate for a seat on the hospital board at the time. I expressed nothing but good will and hope for the future to Geri – as she was replacing an inferior CEO who had run the place for the prior six and a half years.

The voters had their say, and they chose not to have an independent reform-minded person on the board. I attended board meetings for a while thereafter, but eventually closed down my web site and dropped out of the public discussion, except for an occasional letter to the newspapers.

In her first year here, I closely observed Geri, and we had one hour-long face-to-fact chat – just the two of us. After that, I kept abreast of hospital doings through newspaper articles that covered the latest controversy or publicity plant.

From the first, my primary impression of the new CEO was that she was a highly manipulative person. Yes, she was smart, media-savvy, a strong leader, sufficiently experienced for the job, but most of all. . .a manipulator.

Geri had spent most of her previous years in Florida’s capital, Talahassee, so playing politics seeme second nature to her. She was well-versed in staging events and promoting an idea or an image. Whidbey Island residents were ripe for the picking, and she was a master at outreach.

Geri did a bunch of the standard political gestures: she created a citizens’ advisory board, she scheduled public meet-and-greets from the north to the south end. She made sure to spread all the good news, while suppressing the negatives. She held open houses and grand openings. And she spearheaded changing the hospital’s name and logo, which even got a new color scheme. 

There’s nothing wrong with trying to boost the hospital’s popularity and visibility. At the same time, however, it appeared to me that most of what she was doing amounted to window dressing.

The predominant need of the hospital, upon Geri’s arrival, was a financial turnaround. Under her predecessor, the year-end ledgers had reported a net loss for five years running.

Geri briefly appeared to have rapidly reversed the financial trends. In 2016, her first full year at the helm, WH reported a 1.3-percent operating budget surplus. 

For 2017, WH reported a (preliminary) surplus of $1.3 million in revenue overall. “We had a strong year,” said Forbes, and CFO Telles added: “We made close to $1.3 million and that’s outstanding. Anytime you’re in the black in health care, that’s a good year.” 

It seems a lifetime ago in view of recent events, but on June 1, 2018, Forbes signed a new three-year contract, at an annual base pay of $390,000, and an annual bonus of as much as nearly $100,000.  The base pay was a 40% increase over her initial contract. The board was thrilled with her.

As reported on this site (see: The Grand Deception, 4/18), those 2016 and 2017 operating surpluses gave a very misleading picture of WH’s total financial situation. What the annual ledgers didn’t show was that the hospital had for years been running up “deferred maintenance needs” on its infrastructure, to the tune of an estimated $35 million in projects going undone. 

How this came to be needs to be fleshed out, and I’ll be ordering documents on the matter. It’s probably didn’t start with the Forbes regime, and perhaps has been going on for the last ten years or more.

In 2018, the two-year run of surpluses came to a resounding and crushing end. Citing “unplanned expenses,” CFO Telles delivered the bad news to the Board in February: “We lost about $6.3 million this fiscal year. . . But we expect to break even next year,” said the man who was just appointed WH’s interim CEO. Officials blamed much of the problem on the pharmacy being out of code, necessitating the construction of a new pharmacy at a cost of almost $4 million. 

Coincident with the bad financial news, Geri Forbes precipitously fell out of favor with WH’s board members. It appears there were multiple reasons for this, not just the hospital’s financial woes. The full story is likely to emerge over time.

At any rate, Forbes announced in mid-March she was retiring effective at the end of June - leaving the Board a little over three months to find a replacement. Less than a month later, however, the Board accepted her sudden resignation from being CEO, effective that very day, April 16.

In a back-room deal, the Board said Forbes was going to stay on, but only as a consultant, for an additional two and a half months – at the absurd pay rate of $390,000 per year. Board members had once reached a similar tentative agreement with previous CEO Tomasino, but community outrage led them to rescind it.

In this writer’s opinion, Forbes was better at public relations than she was at heading up a hundred million dollar business enterprise. While she had much of the community believing in her based on perceptions she had orchestrated, the hospital board certainly should have seen the cracks in her façade.

And yet as recently as last June the Board couldn’t praise her enough, or pay her enough, for her performance. Even last month, board president Ron Wallin released a statement that credited “her dedication and hard work in getting us this far,” and adding, “she is greatly appreciated”.

My assessment is, first, that she never succeeded in earning the respect or trust of her employees. Secondly, based on the recent downturn in patient days, days of cash on hand, surgeries, imaging testing, etc., she appears to have presided over a decline in business – in part due to an inability to win back customers who stopped using the hospital in recent years. That suggests she was unable to improve WH’s reputation in the community. Most of all though, if she caused any uptick in the hospital’s finances, it was short lived – and the hospital’s long-term financial status only worsened.

Geri’s performance was long on smoke and mirrors, but she was unable to bring any substantive improvement to our troubled operation. Maybe no one can at this point.