Before taking her Reading and Tuscaloosa guests on a tour of her new $19 million hospital, Kiowa County Memorial Hospital Administrator Mary Sweet gave a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the tornadic destruction of her former facility while imparting lessons learned from her rebuilding experience.
Sweet began by recalling the practicality that can only be learned by on-scene observation.
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Funding sources are multiple…
Asked by Tuscaloosa’s Director of Planning, John McConnell, as to where the rest of the rebuilding funding came from, and whether design needs to take a back seat to functionality, Sweet responded that “going for LEED Platinum” increased the cost estimate by “about $800,000 which isn’t bad as a percentage of $19 million.”
Sweet went on to say, “We used insurance proceeds, help from FEMA and the State (Dept of Emergency Management) and donations but were still about $4.2 million short.”
She went on to say that remaining gap was met by a “50/50 funding from USDA (Rural Development) in that half was a grant and the other half a loan.”
Other lessons learned…
Sweet imparted several other tips for her Alabama visitors, such as:
>Don’t agree to arrangements with open-ended financial details…Sweet spoke of the being told a “tent hospital” was available to her shortly after the storm for $2.5 million. “I told the State we didn’t have that kind of money and they said, ‘Just take it and we’ll figure it out later,’” Sweet said. “Don’t make that mistake by being in too big a rush to get something in place. We had to go to modular units because you can’t control temp and humidity in a tent very well, so we couldn’t even run a lab there.”
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