"For Elder Cook, commitment to career resulted in 27 years as a business lawyer and three years as president of California Healthcare Systems. Commitment to community led to 14 years of volunteer service as a city attorney."

"In 1963, Quentin Cook received a Bachelor's Degree from Utah State University. He went on to earn his Juris Doctorate from Stanford University in 1966. He lived in Hillsborough, California for 27 years, working as a business lawyer and managing partner of a San Francisco law firm, then as the CEO of California health care company. He also served his community for 14 years as a volunteer city attorney."

"In 1996 California Healthcare System and MGH were merged into Sutter Health, Sacramento. Quentin Cook by then also was CEO of CHS. His 1995 CEO salary was $311,479 just from CHS. The same year Buhrmann paid himself $379,401 as MGH CEO. Buhrmann, in the 1996 merger also became a Sutter official."

'Millions of dollars of public assets were transferred to the MGH shell corporation in 1985. Probably the comment of a county supervisor at the time, Gary Giacomini, was the most memorable about the event: "The biggest theft of public property in Marin's history."'

Siphoning money from a non-profit to a for-profit entity is legal. Marin General, a hospital owned by residents of the Marin Healthcare District (all of Marin except Novato), has been a victim of that since its 1985 privatization. Siphoned money is patient revenue diverted from patient care. For years privatized Marin General had diverted millions of dollars, but that role has now been assumed by Sutter Health.

Buhrmann and Cook were then public employees. It is violation of California Government Code, Section 1090, for a public employee to make contracts that benefit himself. Both Buhrmann and Cook left public employment to join the private Marin General Hospital Corp. The lease, therefore, is illegal. Buhrmann and cook graciously supplied all the necessary evidence to make the district board's case solid.

In contract Gary Giacomini, then a county supervisor, called it "the biggest theft of public property in Marin's history."

Marin General Hospital is a case in point. Marin General was sold to CHS in 1985. It is now $46 million in debt.

According to Doctor Norman Carigg, who has been with the hospital for 36 years, "the quality of patient care is at its nadir now. Part of the blame can be placed upon managed care," but Carigg places the rest of the blame on CHS, which he says has siphoned millions of dollars to its San Francisco offices.

Quentin Cook -- an attorney formerly with the San Francisco law firm of Carr, McClellan, Ingersoll, Thompson & Horn -- represented the districts in both deals. Cook became the attorney for the nonprofit health care organizations created in those deals to lease the once-public hospitals.

In their lawsuits, the districts allege that Cook and the CEOs violated a conflict-of-interest law preventing government employees from participating in transactions in which they stand to gain from the outcome. Therefore, they argue that the 1985 hospital leases, which are still in place, are invalid.

Both districts allege that those leases heavily favor the nonprofits -- now part of Sutter -- leaving the public with little say in health care issues and virtually no income from the hospitals. "There's a mission that district hospitals have, and there's a mission that nonprofits have, and they are not the same," says Marin Health Care District Board Member Linda Remy. "District hospitals are the only form of organization for hospitals where the mission is to serve everyone in the community."

Quentin Cook was employed simultaneously as general counsel to the Healthcare District and as counsel to an existing corporation renamed MGH Corp. He created California Healthcare Systems (CHS) which owned Marin Health Systems (now Marin Community Health (MCH)), the entity that manages MGH Corp (56). Then Cook became CEO of CHS (57). In that role, he negotiated the 1995 Sutter/CHS merger. He became a Sutter Vice President, resigned in 1996, and became a missionary for the Mormon Church (58). His law firm remains counsel to MGH Corp.

"The covert purpose of the lease was to remove decision making from public oversight and review without vote of the district residents. Attorney Nancy McCarthy then wrote and the Calif legislature passed a law requiring that similar transfers of healthcare district assets need a vote of district residents "

"Professional staff who brought violations to the attention of the District and/or State regulators have been harassed, reprimanded, fired, transferred, and sued."