SPRINGFIELD, Vt. — The former CEO of Springfield Hospital has filed a lawsuit alleging that a consulting firm he hired to help the hospital, together with several individual members of the hospital board, forced him out.
In his complaint filed in federal court in Burlington on Wednesday, Timothy Ford alleged that he resigned from the position of CEO last December after two members of the hospital board came to his office and demanded that he do so within 15 minutes or he would be fired.
“Shocked, confused and distraught, Mr. Ford concluded that he had no choice but to resign in order to avoid being publicly disparaged and humiliated by being terminated, and he so informed (Springfield Hospital Board Chairman George) Lamb and (Board Treasurer Richard) Dexter (III),” according to the filing.
Prior to the alleged forced resignation on Dec. 12, Ford, 57, said in his filing that he had planned to see the organization through a difficult period, that he had a plan in place to bring expenses more in line with revenues and that the path that the Tennessee-based consulting group Quorum Health Resources has followed since his departure has brought the hospital, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, into a more precarious position than before.
Through the suit, Ford, now a South Carolina resident who began serving as Springfield Hospital CEO in November 2013, is seeking twice the value of 12 months of wages he says his contract dictates that he would have been owed as a severance benefit if he had been fired without cause, but not if he resigned or was fired with cause. He said that he is owed $230,894 as of Aug. 9, and that unpaid wages continue to accrue at a rate of $13,582 per two-week pay period. He has been unable to find a new job and also is seeking an unspecified amount in damages for benefits, humiliation and emotional distress.
Though Ford was an employee of Springfield Medical Care Systems, the parent organization of the hospital, his suit states that since Quorum has been in charge of managing the hospital, it is the one that has failed to pay him according to his contract.
Quorum contested its inclusion in Ford’s suit.
“Virtually all hospital CEOs work at the direction of a hospital’s board of directors/trustees,” Quorum spokeswoman Rosemary Plorin said in a Thursday email.
In addition to Quorum, the suit also names Quorum employees: Mike Halstead, currently interim CEO of Springfield Hospital; Wayne Scholz, interim CFO of Springfield Medical Care Systems; Scott Towle, an associate vice president, and William “Chip” Holmes, region vice president. Halstead declined to comment via email on Thursday.
In addition to Lamb and Dexter, Ford also named other members of the hospital’s board in the suit: Stephen Lyon, Eric “Rick” Bibens II, Robert “Bob” Flint, John Bond and Joshua Dufresne, Springfield Medical Care Systems acting CEO. Flint and Bond declined to comment in emails on Thursday. Efforts to reach the other board members were unsuccessful.
Ford “has not sued Springfield Hospital or SMCS because they are protected by provisions in the Bankruptcy Code that prohibit commencing a lawsuit against debtors in bankruptcy without the permission of the Bankruptcy court,” his lawyer Stephen D. Ellis of Paul Frank + Collins in Burlington said in an email Thursday.
In the suit, Ford alleges 10 counts against the plaintiffs including a violation of Vermont fair employment practices statutes, intentional infliction of emotional distress, intentional and/or negligent nondisclosure, two counts of tortious interference, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, negligent supervision, civil conspiracy and punitive damages.
Ford alleges that the press release the board sent out on the day he resigned intentionally obscured his plans to help correct the hospital’s precarious financial situation, which he said included several steps the hospital has since taken including obtaining a rate increase from the Green Mountain Care Board and changing emergency department providers. He had hoped to avoid closing the birthing center by negotiating with the state for a higher Medicaid rate and obtaining support from Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the suit said.
“Defendants intended to and did cast Mr. Ford in a false light in order to evade their own accountability and potential liability, to claim credit for themselves for the effective measures Mr. Ford had already recommended and/or implemented and to attempt to blame ‘prior administration’ for their failures,” the suit said.
Ford said he fired CFO Scott Whittemore on Dec. 3, nine days before his resignation, because the hospital’s auditors found that Whittemore had failed to pay payroll taxes totaling $3.8 million, resulting in penalties and interest of about $600,000. A forensic audit completed in February also pointed at Whittemore.
Reached by phone on Thursday, the 63-year-old Whittemore said he does not deny failing to pay the payroll taxes as Ford describes in his suit.
“There wasn’t any money to pay them,” he said.
In retrospect, Whittemore, who since leaving the hospital where he had worked for 20 years has lost 40 pounds and can once again sleep at night, said he should have left on his own when it became clear that expenses were outpacing revenues and hospital leaders weren’t addressing it.
Whittemore was not surprised by Ford’s description of the alleged effort to force his resignation, but Whittemore said it wasn’t fair.
“There was plenty of blame to go around,” he said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
