By Luke Thomas
May 21, 2010
This has got to be one the most bizarre confrontations between a public relations flack and a broadcast news reporter we’ve seen in a long time.
While attempting to get answers to questions about the alleged misuse of charitable donations intended to benefit low-income patients at Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH), ABC-7 I-Team investigative reporter Dan Noyes was confronted by LHH public relations flack, Marc Slavin, who intervenes to prevent Noyes from posing questions to LHH Director Mivic Hirose.
In a video posted by the I-Team, Noyes repeatedly asks Slavin to stop touching him. Slavin repeatedly ignores Noyes’ request and later in the video, Slavin prevents the I-Team videographer from documenting the confrontation.
Truly bizarre.
Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is a former software developer and computer consultant who proudly hails from London, England. In 2001, Thomas took a yearlong sabbatical to travel and develop a photographic portfolio. Upon his return to the US, Thomas studied photojournalism to pursue a career in journalism. In 2004, Thomas worked for several neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco before accepting a partnership agreement with the SanFranciscoSentinel.com, a news website formerly covering local, state and national politics. In September 2006, Thomas launched FogCityJournal.com. The BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly, among other publications and news outlets, have published his work. Thomas is a member of the Freelance Unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG-CWA Local 39521 and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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The Hunger Site
May 22, 2010 at 2:43 am
Patrick,
Just write him at Dan.Noyes@abc.com or send your comment to me and I’ll forward it. He’ll certainly want to hear from you. I’m still h@ludd.net
h.
May 21, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Tried three times to post comment on Dan Noyes site but it was ‘declined’, have asked for an explanation without response so far. Working on something short, pithy and pissy. This goes way deep. This doofus is just a piece of spittle dribbling from Molochs maw. I wonder why Dangerous Dan rejected me !!!!!!
May 21, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Noyes should have used Slavin’s head to sweep the floor.
May 21, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Isn’t Slavin detritis left over from Renne’s regency?
-marc
May 21, 2010 at 12:06 pm
As I read Mivic Hirose’s memo to Laguna Honda staff posted above, I found myself wondering how she had missed understanding the chapter “What is a Lie?” in now-U.S. Senator Al Franken’s book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” Franken writes that lies create a worldview “designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted.” He notes that to fight those who fight with lies, “We have to fight them with the truth.” He notes that “We’ve got to be willing to throw their lies in their face.” Mivic, how could you have missed this chapter?
So here goes, here’s the truth: Although Mivic says that the ABC-TV Channel 7 investigation by Dan Noyes is a “distortion of facts,” she herself introduces distortion of facts (read: “distortion of the truth”) by claiming that the gift fund has two uses: “To provide amenities for residents and to provide support for staff.” What Ms. Hirose is distorting is that the LHH patient gift fund (notice how she cleverly removed the word “patient” from the name of the fund?) for decades has never included a provision that it could fund amenities for the staff, like the LHH logo-emblazoned pedometers that nurses can afford to buy themselves, or the “thank you gifts” Mivic is hell-bent on passing out to her nursing staff pet employees. Indeed, once Laguna Honda Hospital was caught with its hand in the patient gift fund cookie-jar, the hospital raced to revise the policy. On April 15, just barely a month ago, with a stroke of the pen the hospital suddenly added the staff support provision into the patient gift fund to help cover its tracks.
The most recent version of policy #45-01 had been dated December 2, 2004, where it went unchanged for nearly six years before LHH fiddled with, and completely re-wrote, the policy on April 15, 2010. And I mean completely rewrote it. The 2004 version was a three-page document, which stated in the “purpose” section that the purpose was “To ensure that LHH Gift Fund expenditures ‘add comfort, welfare, please and happiness’ to the residents.” The purpose section went on to state that the gift fund was a “restricted” fund, but was not intended to support the City’s obligation to operate the hospital (that excludes using the fund for staff operations) nor was it to fund routine City expenditures (e.g., staff development). Rather, the fund was established to benefit residents in general to enhance their quality of life.
In the sudden April 15 (now only two-pages) version of the same policy number, the original purpose is completely gone, and in its place the new “purpose” is to “ensure effective management” of the gift fund. In the December 2004 version, the “policy” section clearly states that the “LHH Gift Fund Management Committee shall have the responsibility to coordinate, plan, review and recommend the approval of projects [to be funded from Gift Fund revenues],” and the committee was specifically charged with reviewing and approving all expenditures over $500. In the April 2010 version, the Gift Fund Management Committee has been completely removed, such that there is now no oversight committee at all.
The December 2004 version of the policy specified several various subaccounts, and noted that each subaccount was a restricted account. None of the listed subaccounts included a “staff support” subaccount. Now that their hands have been caught in the cookie jar, the sudden April 15 version now names three subaccounts for staff education (nurses, physicians and administrators). For decades, educational reimbursement was built into the nurse, physician, and management executive contracts with the City, in which the City set aside dedicated education funds for each of these three professions, but limit the use of City-funded educational expenses to tuition, professional licenses, and the like. Now the educational sub-funds of the patient gift fund are being used to provide meals to highly compensated staff (for instance, the average total salary for Department of Public Health’s 1,258 registered nurses in 2009 was $99,609; its 86 nurse managers averaged $152,280; its 31 clinical nurse specialists averaged $135,825; its 255 physicians averaged $91,165; and the 141 DPH employees represented by the Municipal Executive’s Association averaged $126,234), so it is hypocritical to suggest that these highly-paid staff need to have an “education fund” that appears to be fattening themselves up via catered luncheons. Can’t they pay for their own lunches out of their salaries like the rest of City employees do?
Mivic acknowledges that the gift fund has paid for meals for staff retreats, but fails to mention that the three management retreats held each fall to develop LHH’s budget submission for the next year involve approximately 50 of LHH’s hand-picked top management staff; she also doesn’t tell you about the “facilitator” fees paid to have motivational speakers attend the retreats, where managers sit around and build such things as towers out of paper and scotch tape, ostensibly to inspire them to get their creative management juices flowing.
Neither Hirose nor LHH’s minister of disinformation, Marc Slavin has mentioned that the April 2010 version of the gift fund policy suddenly re-written when California’s Licensing and Certification Division learned of this sorry state of affairs, has completely removed the “Authority” section of policy #45-01 that had been included in the December 2004 version. The Authority section referred to San Francisco Administrative Code Section 10.100-201, Public Health Gift Funds, which clearly states that the “LHH Gift Fund, [which is a public trust] is intended for the general benefit and comfort of patients of Laguna Honda Hospital.” This section of the City’s Administrative Code has not been revised since December 2000, and it provides no authority for use of these restricted funds for staff education or staff meals.
Heeding Senator Franken’s advice, in an effort to throw the truth in Mivic’s face I note that implicit in the “public trust” is an expectation that Section 10.100-201 does not permit her to distort the truth (lie) about the patient gift fund, or the policy’s revision history. Shame on her and her spin-doctor, Marc Slavin!
As far as the public trust goes, where is San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris in this mess? If it were an in-home healthcare caregiver who had bilked money out of an elderly home-bound, disabled woman, Harris would be “all over it” in prosecuting the caregiver for elder financial abuse, and the interrelated elder neglect caused by patients losing their quality of life by reducing their “comfort, welfare, please and happiness” — and the Chronicle and the Examiner would have made such news a front-page story (instead, both papers turn a blind eye to potential mismanagement of LHH’s patient gift fund). Why is the LHH patient gift fund held to a different standard by Kamala Harris? Why are LHH’s caregiver-administrators held to a different standard of potentially mismanaging funds intended to benefit its patients? Is Harris too busy running for State Attorney General that she can’t be bothered to look into potential white-collar mismanagement of restricted funds intended for patients?
While Slavin and Hirose try to spin-control that Dan Noyes’ investigation was a distortion of fact, it is the pair of them who are distorting the truth. And they think they can do that by simply re-writing Policy #45-01, without changing the San Francisco’s Administrative Code Section 10.100-201. I hope State Licensing and Certification slaps a citation, and a hefty monetary fine, on Laguna Honda. Maybe that will get Mivic to read, and possibly finally understand, Franken’s chapter, “What is a lie?”. As for Slavin, even if he read it, his history at Laguna Honda suggest that he’ll just keep presenting misinformation to the public, while he collects his $132,518 City salary. Is that what the City’s taxpayers now fund: City employees potentially incapable of telling the truth?
He once claimed to me that he was sent to a job at Laguna Honda to keep negative news out of the media until LHH held its ribbon-cutting ceremony for the replacement hospital. Now, almost single-handedly, he’s generating negative news all on his own! Bless his pointed little sneer.
And where is Gavin Newsom hiding in all of this ? Hopefully, the Janice Hahn campaign will make some campaign hay out of the fact that Marc “1375 Special Assistant XVI” Slavin is widely thought to report directly to Mayor Newsom, or possibly to former City Attorney Louise Renne (Slavin’s former boss when she was City Attorney), who established the LHH Foundation as a private 501(c)(3) non-profit under her sole control, since Slavin’s office at LHH is in space formerly used by the LHH Foundation.
Thanks, Mr. Noyes; you’ve provided an invaluable service to San Francisco by exposing this story.