Love or hate him, Will Geer will not be ignored

ALBANY — In 2003, Will Geer was just an ordinary CPA, filing tax returns and performing forensic audits. Fifteen years and a Phoebe Factoids Facebook page later, he is one of the most reviled or admired people in Albany.

You may not know the face, but most remember the name.

First a little factoid history:

“In 2003, Charles Rehberg, a certified public accountant, and Dr. John Bagnato, a surgeon, stumbled across financial documents showing that Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, had ‘$2.6 billion in cash and transferred millions to offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.’ These documents, which became known as the Phoebe Factoids,’ were then faxed anonymously, under the headline ‘Top 10 Most Highly Guarded Secrets at Phoebe,’ to businesses all across Albany,” Geer wrote on the Phoebe Factoid Facebook page he created in 2017

Geer added that infuriated executives at Phoebe demanded that Ken Hodges, then-District Attorney of Dougherty County, investigate who was behind these faxes. Hodges later admitted that he “used a grand jury subpoena in 2003 to trace the source of the Phoebe Factoids, and then turned that information over to Phoebe Putney Hospital officials.”

It took more than seven years before the issue between Phoebe and the Phoebe Factoids was finally settled, but Geer, who had been lurking in the background, pushed the issue to the front first on a private website before hitting Facebook.

Not coincidentally, that was around the same time Lee County announced plans to build a 60-bed for-profit medical center on land that housed the Grand Island golf course. The Facebook page caught the attention of many residents who were anti-Phoebe, and more specifically, anti-hospital CEO Joel Wernick.

Geer said the Factoid Facebook page took off with Phoebe’s report in opposition to the Lee County Medical Center, which was released in May of last year.

“I’ll tell you the story that you know, you probably know better than me,” Geer said. “I knew there was something going on at that time, and now I wish I would have paid more attention to it. But it was apparent to me that the LCMC study by Phoebe was a contrived, calculated and a manipulative attempt to usurp the Federal Trade Commission’s consent order.”

The consent order stemmed from The Phoebe Health System’s $190 million purchase of the former HCA Palmyra Hospital. Part of that order, reached in an anti-trust settlement with Phoebe, prevented the hospital from attempting to influence or prevent another hospital or medical center from opening in Phoebe’s service area within a five-year span. The timing of the LCMC fell in that window.

Needless to say Facebook exploded after the Phoebe study was released. The battle reached the Dougherty County Commission, resulting in lawsuits against the Department of Community Health, a challenge of the state’s certificate of need law, and appeals before the Dougherty Commission finally gave up the ghost in mid-June.

As the Factoids have wound down, Geer has created The Albany Chronicle. The page is basically a combination of a news aggregator and The Squawkbox … on steroids. Site members can rant and rave, talk of conspiracies, allege local government corruption and anything that has gotten under their skin.

However, the past few years have taken their toll on Geer, leading to a comparison of himself and Albany.

“If you look at the profile picture that I use right now on my Facebook page — I think that picture is probably 15 years old — and you put it beside the man you are looking at right now, there is a stark difference,” Geer said. “But if you see yourself every day in the mirror you don’t see the aging, the change that is taking place.”

Geer used the mirror as an example of what he says is happening in Albany and Dougherty County right now.

“Since I am in and out of town a lot, I see the change that is taking place here,” he said. “I sometimes spend extended periods away from Albany. So I think a lot of people aren’t really seeing what I remember to be a vibrant town with good economics and good commerce taking place. And parts of Slappey, which has never been the greatest part of town, it has definitely declined with the foot traffic and the homeless people.

“Now it seems like the homeless people are everywhere. I am interested in the correlation with the decline of corporations in Albany. How did we get to where we are now and how do we change it?”

Will Geer may never get an answer to that question. But he will continue to ask it. And he will not be ignored.

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