A new vice-president was elected to the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital Board of Directors Thursday, when the board held its regular monthly meeting at Snoqualmie City Hall. Joan Young, recently removed from the position of president, was quickly and unanimously elected as Vice President of the board of commissioners.

The board of commissioners also heard reports about the financial and medical aspects of the hospital district and an update on improvements coming to the building.

David Speikers delivered a finance committee update. Since the opening of the hospital in May, the district revenues are up in almost every category including endoscopy, lab, X-ray, ultrasound, CT scan and outpatient rehab. Each area met or exceeded its revenue predictions.

Speikers also reported that the hospital district is $98 million in debt, including bonds approved in May to refinance the district’s existing debt at a lower interest rate.

Ryan Roberts pointed out that taxpayers are not responsible for that debt.

Speikers also reported the district is accumulating cash at approximately 2 percent and expected to have $6 million in the bank by the end of the year.

“Six million in the bank is really good because we had nothing in the bank five months ago,” Speikers told the board. “It’s good because, we are taking all the money from our Critical Access (Hospital) reimbursement and putting it in the bank….then we are going to decide what we are going to do about it as a board.”

Possibilities for the funds included applying for a new line of services or paying back taxes, he said.

Joan Young presented the medical committee’s report, which indicated a 53 percent increase in average daily emergency department volume since the new hospital opened.

“Our turnaround time is much improved over what it was before and certainly sets the standard, in my opinion, for many hospitals in the greater Seattle area,” Young said.

Gene Pollard asked Tom Parker, the Chief Operating Officer of the hospital, to talk about some of the developments and plans in the works for the facilities report.

Parker said he met with representatives from a solar energy company to explore the possibilities of adding solar power to the building. Representatives of the company said they could not recommend solar-to-electric power for the hospital, because of the extremely long payback period. Instead, they suggested solar-to-thermal as a better alternative.

“Because we heat so much water, they said we ought to look at solar-to-thermal. It’s a much easier technology to adopt, much lower cost, and so now they are working on providing us a proposal,” including costs and potential savings to implement a solar-to-thermal system to augment the hospital’s current boiler system.

Parker also spoke about their two-phase plans for hospital signs. The first phase will have a signs on the building and two monument signs, one at the entrance that goes on the side of the hospital and a large sign on the corner of Frontier and 99th. These will be installed on Oct. 27. Phase two will include more signs on Snoqualmie Parkway.

“The reason for two signs is because the one that’s on 99th and the Parkway will face out to traffic coming up and north, the one up the street is for traffic coming southbound,” Parker said.

The board went on to pass two resolutions, one adopting the change in bylaws made at the Sept. 3 meeting that removed Young from the presidency, and another approving a $150,000 legal settlement with former real estate broker Jim Grace. Another resolution, to revise spending authorities policies that did not require a vote of the board, was not voted on. Instead, the board asked Speikers to revise the proposal for its next meeting.

The next hospital board meeting will be 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, at Snoqualmie City Hall.