County has $400,000 to give away
Plans to use money for cancer hospitality house

McKinley County officials are in negotiations to buy the former Mother Goose Learning Center building on Wyatt Avenue in Gallup to establish a place for cancer patients who travel great distances to stay overnight during treatment. The funding for the purchase is from a State grant of $400,000.[Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

Second in a two-part series

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — County officials have a problem: $400,000 is sitting in the bank waiting for someone to decide how to use it.

The money is earmarked for the local cancer center, but the county can’t just give it to the center since the New Mexico Cancer Center is operated by a private company, the New Mexico Oncology and Hematology Associates, and giving them the money directly would be a major violation of the state anti-donation laws.

McKinley County Manager Tom Trujillo said the $400,000 came from a state grant approved in 2006.

“We thought that we could have used the money to purchase a piece of equipment that was needed by the center and then lease it back to the center,” he said. This would be in line with the deal that the county has with the Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital Association — the county owns the building used by the association as a hospital and leases it to them for $1 a year.

The problem was, however, that almost all of the equipment used by the center cost more than $400,000 and it wasn’t possible to pay for part of the cost because of the confusion over ownership.

So several months ago, county officials realized that more and more of the center’s clients were coming from two or more hours away, and some were having problems driving back home after receiving treatment at the center.

Why not, county officials thought, use the $400,000 to buy a building, convert it into apartments and provide a place where patients and their families could spend the night after treatment so that a patient would have a chance to rest before having to go back on the road.

So Plan A was to buy a certain building that was near the hospital but this went nowhere because the owner had no interest in selling the county their property.

Plan B — trying to purchase some land near the hospital from local developer Rick Murphy — also went nowhere.

“So now we are on Plan C,” Trujillo said.

This consists of buying the building and the surrounding land that was once the home of the Mother Goose Learning Center a block or two from the center.

The building is no longer being used as a day care center and Trujillo said that the county is now negotiating with the Vanderwagen family about purchasing it.

The two sides met on Wednesday to discuss a possible sale to the county and while Trujillo said he wasn’t at liberty to give out any figures until the deal was done, he said he was optimistic that the two sides would reach some kind of agreement in the near future.