Lisa Zahner

Cleveland Clinic's recent defense of its “journey” through mediocre hospital safety grades to local Hospital District trustees must have struck some as painfully reminiscent of the explanation a parent might get from a teenager at a sit-down about lackluster school marks.

Neither Vero Beach nor Indian River County has plans right now to stop adding fluoride to the local drinking water, but the topic is likely to be up for discussion soon following new guidance from Florida's Surgeon General and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vow to ban fluoride.

The trials of Orchid residents Elizabeth Jewkes-Danielsen and Paul Danielsen for their part in a deadly May 2022 crash involving an elderly John's Island couple has been postponed four months by Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Cox.

With the public eye now trained on the Indian River County Hospital District, several district trustees want Cleveland Clinic officials to tell them in detail why the Vero hospital is faltering financially and how they intend to right the ship before they pull out a checkbook to fund a $13.6-million bailout.

A month after Cleveland Clinic took issue with a comparison of their Florida hospitals to Orlando Health's hospitals based on the latest Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, they still have not provided data from the Vizient company that the Cleveland's chief safety officer told the Indian River County Hospital District would provide a more accurate picture.

Orlando Health has announced it intends to issue up to $200 million in bonds to refinance its purchase of Sebastian River Medical Center and to make improvements to the hospital, as part of a larger $1.5 billion investment in its hospital network.

The Indian River County Hospital District has the chance to make a fresh start in January, to earn back some of the trust and goodwill it's lost over the past month or so. But that's not guaranteed.

A proposal to give Cleveland Clinic $13.6 million in taxpayer funds to cover losses at Indian River Hospital seems all but dead – an 11th hour hitch which followed stories in this newspaper that triggered an overwhelmingly negative public response to the Hospital District's mishandling of the matter.

A few days before Christmas, the Hospital District did some last-minute shopping, laying out almost $4 million of taxpayer money for an abandoned building on 10th Street, behind Dyer Chevrolet, that was once used as group housing for foster children aging out of the system.

Shelling out $4 million of taxpayers money to buy an abandoned property and turn it into a women's sober home – with no business plan for the program, zero expertise in the industry, and no clue how much it would cost to repair, insure, maintain and operate the facility on an annual basis – might sound like another insane local government decision.