I am so tired of reading about the so-called hospital project in the local rags. Every time the paper comes out there is an article describing the progress of the project. The article usually includes remarks from representatives from the Hospital board that they will be getting their certificate of need soon. Well folks that has been the same old answer for 5 years now and they are no closer to getting that certificate than anything. Everyone including the hospital board knows there is no way they can get the Critical Access designation They make statements that they are having their Congressman change the rules, they have spent a good deal of taxpayer funds sending their consultant to Washington DC to try and get someone to embark on changing the rules. I have correspondence from Congressman Wu, where he states that there is nothing that he can do to change the rules regarding this hospital boards problem of Critical Access designation, and there is NO ONE working on their problem at this time.

The Hospital board can not get their water from Mc Nulty Water because the PUD does not have enough water to satisfy their current customers and the addition of a hospital which would require huge amounts of water for daily operations and enough water for fire safety.

Now they will try and get their water from the City of St. Helens, which they cannot do since they are not with in the city limits and are with in a PUD. I wonder what rules and regulations the city of st Helens and the hospital board will circumvent this time?

There are so many problems with this proposal for a hospital that are to numerous to list, I wonder how many more times this current hospital board and their associates will beat this horse to death.

I have and will hope that this hospital board realizes that as a community we cannot support a hospital, and like everyone knows we are with in 35 miles of good operating hospitals either way we go. I think it is about time that the board stops spending pouring tax dollars into a money pit.

After all what this group is proposing is NOT what the voters were presented and what the voters passed. One more issue with this group is why did they take funds from the levy and pay off the building of Community Health, and why have they been transferring funds into community health? That was not what the levy entailed I think that this board should have to answer some of these questions don't you?

I have asked our newly County Commissioner Earl Fisher some questions regarding the proposed hospital and he assured me that he would get me the answers from the board, that has been about 4 months or more ago and the board has never retuned his calls. I guess this board don't have to answer to the public all they need to do is sit and collect a million dollars a year from our taxes and spend it any way they wish, and we should be satisfied.

Construction for a new Kaiser hospital has just broken ground off Cornelius Pass, so we now have one more hospital with a state of the art facility being built. We don't need a wanta be facility in St. Helens when we can go directly to any good hospital with in a reasonable distance for medical care at no special taxing cost to us.