Internet takes center stage in fight against hospital district

By: DAVID FRIED - Staff Writer | Monday, June 6, 2005 9:30 PM PDT ∞

ESCONDIDO ---- When it's David against Goliath, every penny counts.

So in the fight over where to locate Palomar Pomerado Health District's new hospital, two grassroots campaigns fighting to keep the facility in downtown Escondido have relied on the Internet and e-mails, rather than telephone banks and fliers, to get their messages out.

"(A regular campaign) costs a lot more money. This is pretty inexpensive," said Wally Gutierrez, co-founder of Citizens for a Downtown Hospital.

Using his home Internet connection, Gutierrez and Larry Michel, a local orthodontist, launched the Web site www.citizensforadowntownhospital.com in January as a way to disseminate information quickly and on the cheap to other community members.

The $9.95 account, he said, is a bargain compared to the price of printing, postage, phone calls and other more traditional means of building a grassroots campaign.

The idea, he said, is to try to convince the district's board to renovate the existing Palomar Medical Center on Valley Parkway, rather than building a new facility. Hospital officials have said they oppose that idea. They do plan, however, to convert the existing hospital into an administrative and outpatient facility.

Gutierrez's Web page, which provides contact information for city and hospital officials, as well as notices about upcoming council and board meetings, has received just over 19,000 visits since January, he said.

Gutierrez and Robroy Fawcett, who recently launched his own Web log ---- or "blog" ---- chronicling the debate, said they worry about the potentially devastating economic consequences of moving the hospital out of downtown.

Palomar Pomerado officials plan to build a $531 million hospital at the Escondido Research and Technology Center, a business park on the western edge of the city.

However, doing so would require that the City Council approve the district's zoning permits, something that seems unlikely after a council majority passed a resolution last month opposing that plan.

To attract people to his site, Gutierrez sends almost daily e-mails to a list of about 900 local medical professionals, merchants, public officials and media contacts.

"We send it to everybody," said Gutierrez.

To some extent, the campaign has already proven effective at catching the eyes of local officials looking to gauge public reaction to the debate.

"Are they sites we look at from time to time? Yes," Gustavo Friederichsen, Palomar Pomerado's marketing director, said of Gutierrez's and Fawcett's Web pages. "Are we fixated on them on a daily basis? Absolutely not."

Councilwoman Marie Waldron said she reads the group's e-mails regularly and believes they present new perspectives and raise new issues.

When she and councilmen Ed Gallo and Sam Abed voted to pass the resolution opposing the hospital's planned move to the business park, most of the 12 or so speakers at the meeting were wearing tags naming Gutierrez's group.

Citizens for a Downtown Hospital also produced something of a spin-off in Fawcett.

Fawcett, a local patent attorney who signed on to Citizens' e-mail list, began posting his own blog last month. He started the site, www.esco1.blogspot.com, by registering for a free account at Blogger.com.

Along with Fawcett's musings on the matter, his site includes links to relevant newspaper articles and public documents. And, like most blogs, Fawcett's offers readers a chance to post their comments alongside his own.

Based on the lack of responses so far, he said, the site hasn't exactly been teeming with traffic and it may not appeal to more than a handful of people interested in reading the documents and other nitty-gritty details about the hospital.

But Fawcett said that maintaining the site provides a way to document the evolution of his own research and thinking on the matter.

"I think if people do care about the issue, they'll look at this (blog) and say, 'Wow, I didn't know that.' Because I didn't," said Fawcett, who spends 5-10 hours a week researching and writing his postings.

Taking a local grassroots campaign to the World Wide Web is a natural outgrowth of the role blogs played in mobilizing voters on the political left and right for the 2004 presidential election, according to Kari Chisholm, an Oregon-based political consultant who develops Internet strategies for clients.

On a local level, he said, the online diaries serve to detail issues often overlooked in the media and provide a sounding board for people who care deeply about an issue and wonder whether anyone else in the community shares their opinions.

"A blog can serve as that organizing role for people who do care about the issue but otherwise would never meet," Chisholm said.

But the fact that they appeal to deep political convictions and are so easy to start can also limit their effectiveness, according to Thad Kousser, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego.

"They haven't been a good way of organizing people that aren't interested in the issue already," Kousser said. "You're not going to get 1 million people to gather at the Lincoln Memorial (with a blog or Web site), but you can get 20 people to show up at a City Council meeting."

Contact staff writer David Fried at (760) 740-5416 or dfried@nctimes.com.

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