MHP’s CEO Jay Christensen spends some time discussing plans after the failed urban renewal vote

Mahaska Health Partnership's Jay Christensen sat down with Osky News on their plans going forward with construction.

Editors note: This is the first of a multi-part story on Mahaska Health Partnership and it’s construction project.

I had an opportunity to sit down with MHP’s CEO Jay Christensen Monday morning and discuss some of the Hospitals steps and plans after the urban renewal vote.

The Mahaska County Supervisors had voted down an urban renewal designation that would have allowed Mahaska Health Partnership to issue general obligation bonds versus the higher interest rates associated with revenue bonds.

I asked Christensen if he intended to go before the Supervisors once again on the urban renewal.

“Well I don’t know yet, cause I’m still waiting on some final information from our bond council who must have taken off for Christmas.”

“It would be prudent to at least go back and have another conversation, whether that’s the direction it goes or not will depend upon how that conversation goes (bonding agent), but i would imagine we would try to revisit it at least a little bit.” stated Christensen.

Originally, MHP was going to be getting funding from the USDA, I asked him when and how the Hospital became aware of the loss of that option.

Christensen said “We had 2 applications in with the USDA actually, the first one was funding that was available because Mahaska County was considered a disaster area from the floods of 2008. So that qualified projects like this for some loan funding, of low interest loans, not grants.”

“We also had an application in through their regular community development.”

“The first one, which was the best one for us, was the disaster funds and that was pulled somewhere around the end of august. I basically got a frantic phone call from the USDA, basically saying funding’s been pulled.”

MHP's new helipad that was completed as part of Phase 1 of construction during 2010.

Now that they will currently rely upon revenue bonds, I was curious to know what the dollar amount in difference would be at this point between the GO bonds and the revenue bonds.

Christensen explained “It changes every single day and at the end of the year, there was kinda a glut of public revenue bonds, I mean that could change by next week. You know we were looking at 14.4 million as of the day we were at the board of supervisors and it was over 15 million by the time my board meet.”

“We could calculate it multiple times a day depending upon what’s happening in the market. It looks like rates could have jumped at least another quarter percent, maybe half at that point in time and every one of those is hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of that debt.”