It’s been disappointing to see our Summit County commissioners fail at every step of the coronavirus response. Rather than early and effective testing and reporting, we have been offered delays and excuses. For too long, it seems our commissioners thought Centura Health would do their jobs for them. Centura Health is here only to generate an excess profit margin by gouging Texas tourists who crash on the slopes. For anything more challenging, our local hospital is no more than a toll booth for shipping patients off to Centura’s Denver-area profit centers. Centura’s frontline medical staff works very hard but under a leadership that apparently looks past local health priorities to focus primarily on their profit and loss statement.

A day late and a dollar short, Summit commissioners have finally invited a competent partner in Vail Health to help. Sadly, the delays brought on by inaction and incompetence will put more of our community at risk of contracting the virus and extend the economic damage that has devastated our local workforce and the businesses they once worked for. I suppose important things like our health and economic well-being should have never been left in the hands of this group of entry-level politicians. Thank goodness for term limits and our community’s ability to replace this defective slate of poor performers.

Perhaps a new team of commissioners can find a way to evict Centura and replace it with a more effective, community-focused provider. It is bad enough that our county commissioners have spent years concocting schemes to snatch public lands (Lake Hill) and open space (Fiester Preserve) to wreck the environment by excess development of high-density public housing projects at taxpayer expense. Those misguided distractions are now moot in the face of a bungled public health crisis and the resulting dead economy.