Matt Hamilton/Daily Citizen-NewsCity officials received only one bid on Friday, from the the DEO Clinic and the Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership, to operate a health clinic in the Mack Gaston Community Center. 

DALTON, Ga. — The city of Dalton received one proposal to operate a health clinic at the Mack Gaston Community Center. The deadline for proposals was 4 p.m. Friday.

“We had one package to open,” said City Administrator Jason Parker. “It looks like is is a joint proposal for use of the space at the Mack Gaston center. The joint applicants are the DEO Clinic and the Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership. I haven’t had a chance to review it yet.”

Parker said officials had hoped to get more proposals.

“We’d like to have as many options as possible in order to provide the best opportunity for the community to have access to health care,” he said.

The DEO Clinic provides primary and preventive health care to financially eligible residents of Whitfield and Murray counties who have no access to health insurance. The partnership promotes health and healthy communities in the Greater Dalton area.

Staff said DEO Clinic Executive Director Tom Brown and Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership Executive Director Greg Dent were out of town on Friday.

DEO Clinic Medical Director Dr. Rod Rodriguez deferred to Brown about specifics about the proposal but said DEO Clinic officials are excited about the possibility of moving into the community center.

“We are pretty much at capacity and have been for about the last year or so,” he said. “We’ve definitely outgrown where we are now.”

The clinic is at 411 Central Ave.

The request for proposals said the vendor must “be open and accept patients no fewer than three days per week, except for days when the Mack Gaston center is closed. Strong preference may be offered to vendors who are willing to be open up to five days per week.”

The DEO Clinic, according to its website, is open Monday through Thursday.

“We have a full-time nurse practitioner and two part-time nurses in addition to the physicians and physician assistants and nurse practitioners and other providers who volunteer with us,” said Rodriguez. “Every day a clinician is available. We’ve been able to increase our clinic hours and actually do appointment times and not do everything as walk-ups.”

Council member Gary Crews said he would have liked to have had more proposals but he isn’t surprised there was only one.

“When you are talking about providing free or reduced-cost health care there aren’t a lot of organizations doing that,” he said.

Parker said he will review the bid and should have a recommendation for the council members at one of their June meetings.

Georgia Mountains Health Services, a Morganton-based nonprofit agency, operated the Partnership Health Center in the community center for some five years. But it left the community center in April, three months before its lease would have ended, claiming it was losing money at the site.

Georgia Mountains was paying $1 a year for the space.

In a letter to council members, Georgia Mountains CEO Steve Miracle proposed three changes to the lease agreement that would have kept that clinic open:

• End the requirement that the clinic be open five days a week.

• Provide a financial subsidy to support the health care for the uninsured.

• Create a long-term contract.

In the letter, Miracle said that during the five years the organization had operated the clinic it had more than 19,000 patient visits and about half of those were by patients who had no health insurance.

Council members instead proposed a temporary agreement that would have kept Georgia Mountains in the community center until city officials found a permanent tenant. The sides did not reach an agreement.