Mayor in D.C.; trying to secure federal funds for Forum

The mayor wants to avoid a Forum sale to an outside operator.

By Don Shilling

Mayor Jay Williams is trying to secure federal funds to help Forum Health reorganize without a sale to an outside operator.

The Youngstown mayor said he launched the idea on a national television show Monday in the hopes it would “gain traction” with federal officials.

On C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Williams said that saving 4,000 local jobs at Forum would be a wise use of funds from federal stimulus or corporate bailout programs. He noted that the city used $350,000 in federal stimulus money to renovate a downtown call center for a California company that intends to create up to 500 jobs.

“We have a track record,” Williams said.

The mayor said the Forum proposal is in the early stages and he has held preliminary talks in the past week with Forum officials and U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Niles, D-17th.

Williams plans to talk to Ryan further this week while he is in Washington and hopes to meet soon with officials in the Obama administration.

Vince Bevacqua, a spokesman for Forum, said company executives hope the mayor is successful but aren’t commenting on specifics of his proposal. Efforts to obtain a comment from the congressman’s office were unsuccessful.

Williams said he wants to avoid Forum’s hospitals being sold during bankruptcy proceedings. Such sales often lead to closing of facilities and large losses of jobs, he said.

Forum is preparing its own reorganization plan that has enough operational changes that the system can be profitable without any closings, he said. Forum owns Northside Medical Center in Youngstown, Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland.

Williams is suggesting federal funds be used to provide loans, loan guarantees or grants to Forum to enhance the viability of its reorganization plan.

He said potential funding sources are the federal stimulus program or the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, that Congress approved last year to buy troubled assets or equity stakes in financial companies.

Williams noted that Congress is concerned about high unemployment and is considering a second round of stimulus funding to provide money to projects that would create jobs immediately.

He said Forum should qualify for such funding because it has developed a reorganization plan that can protect a large number of jobs.

Williams appeared on C-SPAN to discuss how the city has been impacted by the recession and federal efforts to promote recovery.

He talked about the city’s ongoing efforts to expand its industrial parks at former steel mill sites and the city’s efforts to implement Youngstown 2010, which calls for eliminating urban blight and creating more green space.

The mayor is in Washington with Gov. Ted Strickland and others to testify today before the U.S. International Trade Commission. The panel is considering a case filed by V&M Star and other makers of seamless tubes. They are accusing China of dumping, which is selling a product here for less than it does in its home market.

shilling@vindy.com