After more than a year of missed opening deadlines, Foresight Health now says it’s too expensive to renovate and restore health care access at the old hospital in Patrick County.
Instead, the Chicago-based company has offered to donate the property to the county — if the county agrees to pay half of the expenses Foresight said it has incurred while working on the project.
A spreadsheet compiled by the company and obtained by Cardinal News lists Foresight’s expenses as totaling $1.63 million, but not all expenses pertain directly to the hospital.
The spreadsheet lists a series of payments made to the county’s economic development director at the time, totaling $22,000. More than $457,000 went to private jet travel and lodging at a luxury resort.
Invoices for consultants, public relations firms, architects, taxes, water and sewer fees and more were listed in the expense spreadsheet.
At the same time, Foresight has accumulated a $79,481 backlog of delinquent real estate taxes owed to Patrick County for 2022 and 2023, according to documents obtained through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The delinquent real estate taxes are due Thursday; if they’re not paid, another penalty will be applied to the total.
Foresight pressed to have the “donation” completed by the end of 2023 for tax purposes, according to emails obtained through FOIA.
“I wanted to get some tax reductions this year. That’s the reason I wanted to do the deal in 2023,” Foresight’s CEO, Dr. Sameer Suhail wrote in a Dec. 21 email to Patrick County administrator Beth Simms.
The proposed deal was outlined in a Nov. 2 email to Simms from the company’s chief operating officer, Joe Hylak-Reinholtz. The email included Foresight’s final expense total and the amount the company asked Patrick County to pay. Simms said the expense spreadsheet was not provided to her.
Under the proposal, Patrick County was asked to pay $815,000 and provide a letter confirming that the property had a 2023 market value of $3.9 million. In 2023, Foresight had pursued a small business administration loan for the hospital project, and that was the value the bank had placed on the property, Hylak-Reinholtz said this week.
Tax assessments value the property at $4.1 million. Foresight paid $2.1 million when it bought the property in 2022.
“If that’s not a great deal for Patrick County then I don’t know what is,” Hylak-Reinholtz said during a phone interview this week.
Simms provided a written comment to Cardinal News regarding Foresight’s proposal.
“It is not out of the ordinary for a business or individual to ask a locality or their EDA [Economic Development Authority] to purchase property for government use or economic development purposes,” Simms said. “But a company asking a locality’s EDA to reimburse half of their costs incurred since the acquisition of the property that doesn’t add value to the property is unusual.”
The expense spreadsheet wasn’t provided to the county’s board of supervisors, either, said supervisor Brandon Simmons. Instead, he has relied on rumors circulating around county offices to form an opinion about the proposal.
“I don’t think the county needs anything to do with the property. We don’t need to be in the hospital business,” Simmons said.
Following the November proposal, Simms applied for a grant to help cover the cost of an environmental study at the brownfield site, according to documents obtained through FOIA. Simms is still waiting for the grant to come through, so no study has been completed.
The study would help the county understand its financial risk if it were to take ownership of the property.
“It is standard practice when a locality is approached about purchasing one of these properties that due diligence, including environmental studies, are conducted to inform any potential redevelopment or reuse efforts,” Simms said in a Feb. 16 statement that was included in the FOIA request. “Localities can also perform these studies with the permission of the property owner if they don’t intend to purchase the property, and provide these studies to a prospective buyer as a recruitment tool.”
The hospital, previously operated by Pioneer Health, closed in 2017 after announcing bankruptcy. It joined a string of 136 other rural hospital closures in the U.S. between 2010 and 2021, according to data from the American Hospital Association.
With hospital equipment still sitting inside, the building has been vacant since then. Foresight bought the property in April 2022 with promises to restore health care access at the facility by the end of that year. But since then, very little progress has been made on the project.
The necessary renovations were greater than what the Foresight team had anticipated, Hylak-Reinholtz said. Before the purchase, the company had relied on a cost estimate from a county official, although Hylak-Reinholtz would not say who that was.
A vendor hired by Foresight also performed a rudimentary assessment, leading the company to believe that the project was within its budget. But then, according to Hylak-Reinholtz, the cost of materials soared due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hylak-Reinholtz said that no economic feasibility study was carried out before Foresight purchased the building. The company did a basic data analysis but mostly relied on word of mouth that health care services were needed in the county, he said.
In a January press release, Hylak-Reinholtz said that after months of strategizing, Foresight had determined that it wouldn’t be able to reopen the hospital without obtaining additional funding, and proposed that the state provide financial support.
“Hospitals are expensive to run. Old hospital buildings like the one in Stuart, Virginia need a lot of attention, which can cost millions of dollars to do it right,” Hylak-Reinholtz said in the January release.
The proposal to transfer the property to the health authority had been made several months earlier, in November. 
Jet travel, stays at Primland, PR help
The largest expense listed on the spreadsheet was private jet travel in 2022, totaling $432,625. This included $74,875 for aircraft insurance, $53,858.90 for jet management and $24,881.75 for a jet work order.
Multiple invoices from luxury resorts were listed in the expense spreadsheet, totaling $24,969 between April and October 2022, including seven stays at Primland Resort located about 20 miles outside Stuart. Foresight executives also included an invoice for Olde Mill Golf Resort in Laurel Fork and one for a stay at an Airbnb.
Jet travel and luxury lodging account for 28% of the expenses in the spreadsheet, though Hylak-Reinholtz said he did not expect county taxpayers to pay for these services.
“The county asked us to give them our expenses. We didn’t cut anything,” Hylak-Reinholtz said, adding that he had anticipated negotiating with the county on what would be considered expenses.
Without the travel costs, Foresight’s expenses would have come to $1.1 million.
From May to December 2022, eight payments described as “grants consulting” were made to Sean Adkins, who at the time was the county’s director of economic development. Adkins was paid $22,000 over the course of seven months.
During a phone interview this week, Adkins said that when Foresight bought the hospital, the company’s leadership approached him, asking him to come on as an official consultant.
In his role as the economic development director for the county, Adkins was responsible for identifying and applying for grants to help start businesses in the county.
“I thought it was strange because I was going to do that anyway [for Foresight] because it was my job,” Adkins said.
According to Adkins, he carried on normally, just with a little extra income from Foresight.
He said he made sure that accepting the money was aboveboard, saying he consulted with and got permission from county officials before accepting the compensation.
Jim Guynn, who is now the county attorney but wasn’t at the time, said he could not speak to the specifics of the agreement between Foresight and Adkins. But he said he could not see a situation in which a county employee in economic development would be paid by an incoming company.
Simms did not work for the county at the time; she became county administrator in October 2023. Adkins left his role in Patrick County in 2023, taking a job as town manager in St. Albans, Vermont.
Discussions about incentive programs, such as a performance agreement in which the county could be responsible for covering project costs if the developer failed to do so, came up a few times between Adkins and Foresight leadership, but those discussions didn’t go far, Adkins said.
“I was very clear that we wouldn’t be doing that,” he said.
Foresight also paid $168,572 to JLK Consulting, a Republican consulting firm that specializes in political strategy and campaign solutions for political and corporate clients. Initial engagement with the company is listed as April 2022 in the expense spreadsheet.
Another $140,688 was paid to Interdependence Public Relations, a communications firm based in New York. There is no date listed on the expense sheet to indicate when the first payment was sent to the firm, but the second payment is listed in April 2022. Payments ceased in September 2022.
The public relations firms helped Foresight set up events and meetings with county officials, Hylak-Reinholtz said. Its services were needed even more when local media outlets picked up stories about Suhail, the company’s CEO.
In May 2022, Cardinal News reported that one of Suhail’s other hospitals in Chicago, Loretto Hospital, had been at the center of several controversies, including an investigation by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Suhail owns at least four companies connected with Chicago’s Loretto Hospital.
It was reported that Suhail won contracts worth $4 million from the nonprofit hospital while Loretto board members took hospital-funded Caribbean trips.
In 2013, Suhail purchased a hospital on Chicago’s West Side at auction for $250,000 with the intention to demolish the closed facility. He considered pouring up to $30 million into the property to create a new health hub for primary care or outpatient services.
Nothing ever came of it and he eventually abandoned the project.
