By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- The Town Council and their attorney on Thursday met in a closed-door session to start to figure out what they want to get out of an asset transfer deal with Massena Memorial Hospital.

MMH is in the process of converting from a public, town-owned hospital to a private, non-profit entity. Part of that is the hospital and the town agreeing on how Massena will be compensated for the loss of MMH and its assets.

“There were no decisions as far as setting specific policy. We had a discussion on the hospital’s future … what role the town will play … how we will get a resolution that will satisfy the town council and also do right by the community and make sure the hospital is here in the long term,” Town Supervisor Joseph Gray said Wednesday afternoon. “We haven’t really started negotiating with the hospital.”

There is a concern that the hospital may have difficulty getting financing, given their track record of up until just a couple of years ago losing six figures each month and only breaking even at the end of each year with state bailout money.

“We will be looking at the value of the hospital as an asset, the hospital itself, real estate,” Gray said. “What are those things worth … what will be the new corporation’s ability to pay for those facilities?”

He said local lawmakers do have some leverage as far as negotiating MMH’s future in town.

“The transfer agreement can easily say ‘we the town council agree to transfer the hospital to the new corporation and they will maintain the hospital for x number of years with x numbers of employees,” Gray said.

However, the hospital is negotiating some sort of affiliation deal with two other larger health networks in the state, and the town board doesn’t yet know who they are. MMH CEO Robert Wolleben has only gone as far to publically say one is in the eastern part of the state and the other is in the western part.

“I expect they will when they feel the time is right, but they need to be careful and make sure who they affiliate with will pass muster with the Town Council,” Gray said. “What if the hospital board says we’re going with company G, and the town council says ‘we don’t think company G is going to be here in the long term’?”

MMH officials have said they want to be a private entity by the end of the year, but Gray called that “a challenging deadline.”

“I think we left the meeting the other night with a good idea of where we want to head, and we encouraged our legal council to pursue that agenda with the hospital and its legal council,” according to Gray.