Emails from a regional New York development agency suggest it attempted to fix the results of a study meant to determine the site of a new hospital in Utica, N.Y., a charge the agency's executive director denies, according to the Observer-Dispatch.
Downtown Utica beat out two other locations as the hospital site.
Mohawk Valley Economic Development Growth Enterprises commissioned Elan Planning, Design and Landscape Architecture to conduct a study that would determine where Mohawk Valley Health System's newest hospital campus would be. Emails from the development agency's executive director Steve DiMeo seem to show that he wanted to encourage the architecture firm to say the campus should be located downtown.
"My whole thought process in bringing Elan on board is to make sure that we guide siting decision in favor of downtown," Mr. DiMeo wrote in a 2015 email to other project partners.
The study ended up scoring the proposed downtown location better than the two other sites.
"I don't know why he said that," Lisa Nagle, a principal at Elan, said of the email. "We always conduct ourselves in the utmost professional way. This was pretty much a black-and-white analysis. We do a lot of work of this type. I do a lot of work with communities and economic development entities such as EDGE, and we are always professional and independent with our thinking and we report the facts."
Mr. DiMeo denied that the email proves any intent to direct the site selection process.
"I don’t know," said Mr. DiMeo. " It certainly wasn’t meant to say we were going to steer this with one outcome."