Hoover council chooses members for new Health Care Authority

The Hoover City Council has recently selected a retired insurance executive and a real estate property manager as its first appointees to a newly created Health Care Authority.

On Dec. 6, the council chose Phillip Pope, the retired president and CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, and Alan Paquette, the vice president of property management for Jim Wilson & Associates and a member of the Hoover school board, as its two appointees.

Mayor Frank Brocato named Hoover City Administrator Allan Rice as his appointee.

More people can be added to the board in the future, but these three will be enough people to get the board up and running, Rice said.

Pope retired from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama in 2010 after almost four decades with the company. One of Paquette’s responsibilities is managing The Offices at 3000 Riverchase, formerly known as the Galleria Office Tower.

Rice served 15 years with the Hoover Fire Department before being named executive director of the Alabama Fire College and Personnel Standards Commission. He also served as the program coordinator for fire science and emergency medical services at Jefferson State Community College, has taught numerous courses pertaining to firefighting, emergency medicine and hazardous materials, and has experience as a trauma and flight nurse.

The city is not creating the authority for a specific project, but rather as a general tool to evaluate needs and consider possibilities for better serving the public, Rice said.

“It’s an area of need for our city to continue to expand and provide new health care options,” he said.

The city’s population continues to expand substantially, especially in the 55-and-older age bracket, Rice said.

“We need to be sure we’re providing people with appropriate health care facilities without people having to leave Hoover,” he said.

The authority will likely conduct a feasibility study to determine what might work in Hoover, then formulate a plan and bring it to the mayor and City Council for consideration, he said.

Hoover already has a Medical Clinic Board, but a Health Care Authority has broader powers, including owning and operating health care facilities, Rice said. He doesn’t know that Hoover would pursue that path, but said it is a possibility. Governments all over the state have health care authorities, and some of them own hospitals, he said.

“We see health care as an important strategic piece of our future going forward,” Rice said.

In 2018, Brocato tried to convince the city council to consider $20 million in incentives to get Medical West to build its new $300 million hospital in Hoover rather than in McCalla, but a majority of City Council members opposed the effort after the idea received strong opposition from some residents of Trace Crossings, which is next to the site that was under consideration.

Medical West opened its freestanding emergency department just across Interstate 459 in the spring of 2015, and Brookwood Medical Center opened its freestanding emergency department across town in Tattersall Park near Greystone in November 2015.

Former Hoover Mayor Tony Petelos also launched a major effort to bring a hospital to Hoover, but former Gov. Bob Riley killed the effort in 2009. Riley rejected an amendment to the state health plan that would have allowed a 140-bed hospital in Hoover even though Jefferson and Shelby counties had an overall excess in hospital beds.

The Baptist Health System and Brookwood Medical Center, separate entities at the time, supported the amendment, each desiring to build a hospital in Hoover, but Riley said it wasn’t reasonable to allow construction of a new hospital when there were hospital beds going unused in Jefferson and Shelby counties.