Hospice of Jefferson County Executive Director Maggie Palmer and Hospice Board President Sheila Owen have been plotting the demise of the Hospice Foundation for two years.

Or has it been four years? Maybe it's been three. Who knows? It's a secret.

But that very secret is the focal point of our community's all too-public discussion about the Palmer-Owen scheme to radically change Hospice of Jefferson County as it is known today.

For those of us who were recently dismissed from the Hospice Foundation by the Owen-led Hospice board, we know that all her public statements about audits, cost-benefit ratios and breaching confidentiality are hooey. Owen supports Palmer's desire to control the foundation. Palmer wants to fire Hospice Foundation Executive Director Linda Barniak and her assistant, Jane Spencer, and replace them.

The problem for Palmer and Owen is that for years they have been running head-on into foundation board members who keep politely asking them to explain why dismantling the foundation is in the best interest of Jefferson County.

And thus the Hospice crackup. Palmer and Owen have hit their heads so often the last few years, that they are now doing odd things.

If you are a manager long enough, you eventually have to perform crisis management. And through that experience you also learn to recognize the difference between a person who is a crisis manager and a person who manages by creating crises.

Palmer is the latter. She has been creating one crisis after another, so much so that former foundation board members such as James Fayle and Maureen Lundy-Way will tell you they spent more time justifying their existence than they did raising money so no one in Jefferson County would ever be turned away from Hospice care due to a lack of insurance.

Palmer has grown increasingly bitter and cold to foundation members since 2005, when they dared ask her what she was thinking when she and city attorney Bob Slye, a former Hospice member, jerry-rigged a deal to buy the site of a former whey plant on the cheap on which to build a Hospice House.

For starters, foundation board members learned about buying the city-owned site when it was announced at a City Council meeting.

While the proposal would have certainly benefited the city — Hey! No more whey! — the foundation asked the following question:

Let me get this straight. You went to the city in secret, cooked up a proposal to build a Hospice House on an abandoned, chemical-soaked industrial site where there's no telling what's under the ground, and now you want us to beat the streets and raise $4 million to make it work?

The thing is, no one in the foundation followed that question by telling Palmer she is loopy. Instead, most of us thought that such a facility might be the way to go and began considering less offensive sites and a partnership with the Ives Hill Retirement Community.

But while a Hospice House was never built, the seeds of contempt for the foundation had been planted. And Palmer seethed as every time a foundation member left in disgust, our board reloaded with another well-respected community leader who understood the business of making money and didn't mind calmly looking through the books every time Palmer and Owen screamed that the foundation was not generating enough cash.

There is a reason Palmer and Owen need to can the foundation right now. And it is the one thing we can all agree on: the 2006 audit.

As Palmer wrote to me in an e-mail last November:

"Rich Murray has done our audit for the past three years. The concern he raised was the expense to revenue ratio which he stated was poor the prior year (2004-2005) and even more concerning this year (2005-2006). His opening statement was that if he as a private citizen was aware of our performance he would not donate money to our organization. This is the problem we need to fix."

Fair enough. The foundation board took that criticism to heart. And here's what then happened:

1. We compared Murray's audits to those of our previous auditor and found them woefully thin on information.

2. I tripped over an internal Hospice document that showed the expense-to-revenue ratio had been improving for 10 years.

3. Former Foundation President Ron Thomson, who was also sacked by the Owen syndicate last week, rooted around the books and began finding several expense items that Palmer had been moving to the foundation side of the ledger. It's not that Thomson cared; costs are costs no matter where they appear. But Palmer's argument that the foundation's expense-to-revenue ratio is lousy was suddenly unraveling.

4. Vice President Joan Treadwell-Woods, another sackee, completed a long-anticipated overhaul of our investments, and under her guidance we have since welcomed a nice upward spike in our endowment.

5. Barniak moved the Hospice Regatta from Henderson Harbor to Sackets Harbor — and businessman P.J. Simao cooked up a new way to expand his Hospice golf tournament. Three things have since resulted: Cash, cash, cash.

Back in the shadows, I was causing real problems. As secretary, it was my job to lead the search to find more board members. You say we have a numbers problem? OK. I went after two of Watertown's best known number crunchers — Betsy Klug and Bill Bonisteel. With their arrival, the foundation significantly upped the ante on thoughtful analysis and rational debate.

Palmer and Owen flipped out. First they manufactured a smear campaign against Barniak, one that I finally had to counsel them against, letting them know that if they didn't stop the sinister use of the words "Barniak" and "embezzlement" in the same sentence, there would be serious blow-back from the foundation.

Such interference by foundation board members sent Palmer toward the edge. On Feb. 22 Barniak sent us the following e-mail:

"This morning Maggie came into my office and stated:

"Due to my lack of formal education she doesn't believe that I know the line of delineation between the responsibilities of an Executive Director versus the Board of Directors.

"She handed me a copy of 1991 Hospice of Jefferson County, Inc. Board Member Manual dealing with By-laws and Descriptions of Board Members. She said I should study it to understand the differences ...

"I told her I had asked for the Board(')s input due to the 'fiasco' over the Auditor's report; that the Board is there to step in when asked for help ...

"Maggie replied that she is sick and tired of the Foundation Board nit-picking away at her staff and she will not allow it to continue. It is destroying moral(e) and furthermore:

"She is appalled at how the 'mission' of Hospice has deviated from proper care of patients and families and she will not continue if it persists...

"She said that I am solely responsible for bringing this agency down to the level that it has fallen and she will not let it go on.

"She then left my office and insisted again 'due to my lack of formal education' I study the manual to understand the roles of myself and my Board."

By spring Palmer's wheels had come off. She told Owen — who then told the foundation executive board — that we were causing morale problems for her staff because on the days we held foundation board meetings, some Hospice employees couldn't find parking spaces.

After a short pause, I looked across the table at Owen and said:

1. If our board meetings are preventing Hospice from fulfilling its mission, we can move to another location. It is an easy thing to fix.

And

2. The foundation board meets once a month at 7:30 a.m. to ensure Hospice has money to operate. If there is a morale problem among the very people who directly benefit from our volunteer efforts, the problem is being manufactured by Palmer, not us.

And thus began the rush to eliminate the foundation before the new audit — by a new auditor — comes out this fall. We all know where the numbers are going, and in the twisted world of Palmer and Owen, good news for the foundation is bad news for them.

Owen's reign of error ends this fall, as she has to leave the board after six years. She will be replaced by soon-to-be-in-over-his-head Stephen Jennings, who in months of meetings with us has offered nothing other than to say he wants to eliminate the foundation because "I just want the fighting to end."

As for Palmer, she will continue to live in Mexico and commute daily to Watertown, all the while ignoring the fact that even though we are serving a region with 130,000 people, she can't move our monthly census numbers above 36.

Last week, Sheila Owen had me thrown off the Hospice Foundation, accusing me of violating Hospice's confidentiality statement by telling the public last week that the Hospice Foundation might be eliminated.

I'll let history judge me on that. My only defense is that I signed a confidentiality statement, not a suicide pact.

Memo to Rande Richardson, Debbie Cavallario and Deanna Nelson.

Thank you for the invitations last week to join the Jefferson Community College Foundation, the Watertown Teen Center Board of Directors and the Thompson Park Conservancy. I need a break from public service for a while, but I'll put together a résumé just the same. If you need a reference, please contact Sheila Owen. Home: 782-6352. Work: 785-9143. Cell: 529-6352. Fax: 785-9294, or e-mail her at sheilao@northnet.org or sowen@twcny.rr.com.

Bob Gorman is the managing editor of the Times.