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Feedback comes in many forms around the offices of the Niagara Falls Reporter.
Just about every issue generates calls, letters and e-mails either praising or critiquing our work. There's even the occasional broken nose.
But no story we've ever published generated quite the sort of response spurred by our package on Children's Hospital and its negligent parent, Kaleida Health. The handsome bonuses paid out to executives of a non-profit corporation that claims to be drowning in red ink particularly resonated, even beyond our usual coverage area.
In addition to a larger-than-usual number of calls and e-mails, the stories were read in their entirety on WBEN-AM 930, the region's only all-news talk radio station. And WIVB-TV in Buffalo sent senior correspondent Rich Newberg up the I-190 to pay us a visit on Wednesday, with the resulting story leading Channel 4's 5:30 and 6 p.m. newscasts and running in some form on each of the station's reports through mid-day Thursday.
Some of the feedback we received on those broadcasts offered two words for our staffers interviewed for the story -- "haircut" and "makeup."
But the substance of Newberg's report cast further doubt on Kaleida's credibility, a resource already shrinking faster than the industrial job market in Niagara Falls.
While a Kaleida spokeswoman nervously read from a prepared statement that quibbled with our numbers (taken from an internal Kaleida document we obtained), she conceded that the organization had paid out more than $1 million in bonuses, even as the corporation's losses approached eight figures.
"Commonly accepted practice," she said.
Maybe it is. And maybe such "commonly accepted practices" give a strong hint as to how Kaleida, an organization formed in 1998, ostensibly to more efficiently manage the hospitals that make it up, managed to lose a staggering $52.8 million in 2001.
We also received word late last week that our report made it to the desk of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
We believe Spitzer's role as public advocate compels him to take a close look at Kaleida's carefully guarded books, which its leaders say leave them with no choice but to close the region's only free-standing pediatric facility and squeeze it into two floors of Buffalo General, one of its two half-empty adult facilities.
It's time someone in authority checked their math.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 12 2002 |