Apologies and Explanations
At the June 12 meeting, two attendees forced commissioners Stephen Falk and Sara Oggel to commit to not hold a special meeting before the end of June so SuperTrack’s contract would automatically renew, and to vote on a multi-year contract for SuperTrack at the July meeting. Falk made his first apology at this meeting. Also at that meeting, several attendees told both Falk and Oggel that they had to resign. Several days later, on June 18, both of them published public apologies on Point ePost and NextDoor.
How to apologize: Sara Oggel's apology on Point ePost and NextDoor:
“I am taking this opportunity to offer my sincere apologies to the Point Roberts Community for my activities in conjunction with the Point Roberts Hospital District. My motivation was to provide a wide range of choices for Medical Care here on the Point.
“I realize that my discussions with one other Board member involving clinic options was at odds with Washington State rules about public meetings.
Once again, I apologize for my errors in judgment and will continue to bring the Point Roberts Community the highest level of health care possible.
“Sara Oggel”
How NOT to apologize: At the June 12 meeting, Stephen Falk said:
“I do acknowledge making a mistake in talking to a commissioner outside of a meeting. After a recent meeting, I felt the need to vent about the discussion that had just occurred. I don’t think that constitutes an infraction but whether it does or not I apologize for creating the appearance of an impropriety (emphasis added). That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”
He is apologizing for the appearance of an impropriety instead of for the impropriety itself.
And we’re not sure which specific impropriety Stephen was referring to. It could be the multiple emails between him and Sara Oggel, or it could be a conversation he and Sara had while they were walking their dogs after the February meeting. Sara alluded to that conversation in the June meeting.
As a reminder, the February meeting was Dr. Anwar's first appearance before the board. Over the previous four months, he had secretly talked, met, and texted with Stephen. At this public meeting, Anwar and Stephen play-acted exchanges to create the appearance that the two were meeting for the first time. In one, Anwar asked when the contract would be up for renewal and Stephen answered as if he hadn’t already told Anwar in their prior secret conversations.
Dr. Sean objected to this departure from the normal procurement process and to being confronted with yet another surprise attempt by Shields to take the clinic contract. The approved meeting minutes say, “John Anwar and Deborah Shields are wanting to put in a proposal” to operate the clinic. The full meeting minutes can be found here.
Then, like Sara, on June 18 Stephen Falk published the following on Point ePost and NextDoor (emphasis added throughout):
“Apologies are best made and received without excuses, explanations or equivocation.
“I have been deeply involved in community service in Point Roberts for a decade. My motivation is to help solve problems, not to be involved in creating them.
“I apologize to the Hospital District and all the people of Point Roberts for my role in all the controversy and anxiety swirling around the District.
“Stephen Falk”
In the first line, Stephen says he’s not going to explain and tells us to not ask. In this case, explanations are needed. He’s a public official, responsible for public resources, and answerable to the public. We are entitled to an explanation. We have a right to know what he's doing and why. But he is expecting us to not make him explain why he has secretly mounted two attempts to replace SuperTrack with the same provider.
Instead of taking responsibility for his actions and the resulting consequences, which he continues to deny, he refers to his "role in all the controversy and anxiety”. And, perhaps most important, he does not apologize to Dr. Sean and SuperTrack, who were the most directly harmed by his actions in both 2020 and today.
Since Stephen won't explain why he did what he did, we offer some clues. Perhaps the question that needs the most explanation is, who would want to replace three experienced doctors with a single part-time doctor and two PAs, and why?
In the series of emails and letters below, several themes recur, starting in 2020 and continuing today. Note also that the written campaign only comes from just Annelle Norman, Barb Bradstock, and Virginia Lester. But to Falk, they seem to be the only ones who matter. On May 24, we submitted a follow-on request for communications between Falk and the Circle of Care board members. We received some on Friday, June 21, enabling us to include some of them here.
On June 20, 2020, two weeks after Deb Shields was fired for betraying SuperTrack and a few hours before the Hospital District Board would meet to consider whether to terminate SuperTrack's contract in order to open the door for Deb Shields' proposal, Barb Bradstock wrote to Stephen Falk. Since this is an email thread, read from the bottom up:
In August of 2020, two days before the board voted on the next contract, Virginia Lester, while also a SuperTrack employee, wrote in support of Shields, stressing the advantage of a local provider (note: the misspelling of Shields' first name is original):
Then, on the morning of the vote, Annelle Norman demonstrated her misunderstanding of how employment works and expressed her belief that SuperTrack's firing of Shields for betraying them was "reckless":
From the approved minutes of the August 18, 2020 meeting, commissioner Stephen Falk explained why he prefers Shields to SuperTrack. The themes are: PAs are as good as doctors, SuperTrack isn't committed to the community, and an urgent care model isn't right for Point Roberts:
It's worth mentioning that without SuperTrack, Deb and Virginia would not have been able to practice the clinic in 2019 and 2020.
On September 8, 2020, following the board's August vote to continue with SuperTrack and just before the next district meeting, Barb Bradstock again wrote the commissioners, repeating the themes made by Stephen at the August meeting: PAs are as good as doctors, an urgent care model isn't right for Point Roberts, and keeping it local:
It's not just a coincidence that Barb's and Stephen's themes are the same. Just as Stephen had secretly helped Shields prepare her proposal to his own board, it appears that he also secretly helped Barb write her letter to his board. This exchange from the day before started with the two of them reviewing drafts of this letter. It's also unclear how Barb had such detailed knowledge about operations at the clinic.
Again, read from the bottom to the top. Note the subject line about a draft letter to the commissioners. And in the middle of this email, Stephen says, "I wonder if I can stand to make a Monday appointment to see what Dr. Bozorgzadeh is like as a physician...":
SuperTrack at Point Roberts has never been just an urgent care practice. From the beginning, they have provided a combination of family practice and urgent care. They've demonstrated their commitment to the community by staffing the clinic with three extremely capable doctors, giving us stellar support through the covid border shutdown, and continuously improving their services well beyond the requirements of the contract.
But despite the last four years of evidence to the contrary, Stephen repeats the same talking points from the past in his recent interview with Pat Grubb. The themes remain the same: PAs are as good as doctors, an urgent care model isn't right for Point Roberts, and SuperTrack isn't committed to the community:
