Opinion ID: 1810729
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Disclosure on MSDH's Website

Text: ¶ 57. The Board argues that Hughes received an unfair advantage because the MSDH disclosed the Board's capital expenditure on its website. The information was disclosed as part of the MSDH weekly CON report on June 1, 2001. The Board contends that the MSDH's decision to overlook the disclosure was arbitrary and capricious. ¶ 58. Hughes testified that he prepared his projected capital expenditure numbers and gave those numbers to Davis to be included in the application sometime around the 23rd, 24th or 25th of May [2001]. Hughes testified that he never altered his capital expenditure numbers from the time he turned them over to Davis. Barnett testified that he did not see any significant discrepancy between the capital expenditure numbers submitted by Hughes and those used by Davis. The Board failed to prove that the numbers were altered. ¶ 59. In addition to the Board's failure to prove that Hughes actually used the disclosed information to alter his projection, the Board's argument is also contradicted by Armstrong's testimony. When questioned about what kind of study he conducted after learning that the capital expenditure information had been disclosed, Armstrong stated that the rankings of the factors that might have been affected by the disclosure were removed from consideration to see if the end result would have changed. Specifically, Armstrong stated: The thought that I had was that, well, we'll do the comparative analysis using all 10 factors and then we'll take out two. We'll exclude the capital expenditure and the cost per bed and see how that affects the rankings of each of the facilities. And the conclusion that we reached was that of those people who disclosed their capital expenditure there was no change whatsoever in the rankings regardless of whether you used 10 factors or eight factors. ¶ 60. In upholding the decision of the hearing officer and the SHO, the chancery court stated: The Department seems to acknowledge that revealing details of Attala Care's bid on its internet site before Mr. Hughes submitted his full proposal was improper. The evidence reveals that because of this concern, the Department made a limited reevaluation of the proposals for the Attala County project as well as other counties and gave consideration to two of the factors that might have been affected by the data that was put on the website. Mr. Armstrong testified that even with these factors deleted from the rating process, Mr. Hughes still had the best rating and that the elimination of these two factors did not change the ranking in any other projects that he reevaluated. There was also evidence that Hughes made no change in the proposal that he planned to submit after Attala County's data was posted on the website. Whether the action of the Department in posting the data on its website had sufficient impact on the bidding process to invalidate it is a fact issue. The hearing officer and the State Health Officer both found it did not sufficiently impact the process to invalidate it, and there is substantial evidence to support this conclusion. There is no evidence that the availability of the data caused Hughes to change his data, and without such evidence, the Court cannot override the decision of the SHO in this area. ¶ 61. This Court finds that there is no basis to reverse the decision of the chancery court affirming the decision of the hearing officer and the SHO. This issue is without merit.