Union organizing at UMC amid budget woes

University Medical Center is facing a challenging budget and year ahead. And it could get more complicated in the future as new groups are looking to get involved.

“How do we go ahead on increasing our operational revenues so that we’re less reliant on those kinds of adjustments,” said Jacob Cintron, UMC’s new president and CEO, “and how do we look at our expenses so that we manage our expenses tighter, better so that hopefully the net gain isn’t that we’re eroding our cash reserves, but that hopefully we begin to build them up.”

With only about a month on the job so far, Cintron is stepping into a position with a lot of problems to juggle all while trying to keep the hospital out of the red.

The county hospital district is asking for a tax increase of about 5 percent for next fiscal year. But even then there will be $629 million in expenses and only $611 million in revenue, caused mostly by decreasing government funding. That’s a shortfall of $18 million that will eat into UMC’s cash reserves, leaving them with only 33 days of cash on hand.

That’s complicated by the new relationship with El Paso Children’s Hospital, still working on getting into full debt repayment there.

And now, a new player could affect future considerations.

“Our main purpose coming over here was that we wanted to share with not only the UMC board and our new leader Jacob Cintron but with commissioners court and our (County) Judge Veronica Escobar about some of our concerns,” said Trinidad Acevedo, a health unit coordinator at UMC.

Acevedo and other UMC associates have been working to organize under the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Texas. They’re now looking to become recognized, and have their concerns about things like salaries hear. That’s something Cintron said he’d be open to.

“(A goal is) recognizing how we compete in the market so that our great employees don’t feel that we’re not really paying them an adequate rate,” Cintron said. “And then we run the risk of losing them to competitors.”

“We just want to be recognized as a voice and and be an important stakeholder that we are,” Acevedo said.