Mayor says secret Planned Parenthood clinic was bad publicity for Fairview Heights
A day after Planned Parenthood said it spent the past year secretly building a state-of-the-art clinic in Fairview Heights, the city’s mayor criticized the announcement, saying it’s not the kind of publicity he wants.
“It’s not the type of news we would like to hear about in Fairview Heights,” Mayor Mark Kupsky said Thursday. “We certainly don’t want to have negative publicity about the city.”
The news came as a surprise to city officials Wednesday morning when it was revealed the Planned Parenthood Center that would bring access to surgical abortions to women would open later in October, replacing the group’s current center at 4529 North Illinois St.
The new $7 million, 18,000-square-foot center located at 317 Salem Place is aimed to expand abortion and reproductive health services access in the Midwest, where officials with Planned Parenthood say reproductive rights are under attack.
“We know the struggle and fight to maintain abortion access will continue, to what I say, ‘bring it on,’” said Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. “We are ready to keep fighting for our patients because we know access to comprehensive medically accurate reproductive health services is a fundamental right and imperative in order to achieve gender equity.”
The move apparently caught city officials and residents off guard. Even though Planned Parenthood already had a facility on Illinois 159 that offered medication abortions, along with pregnancy counseling, birth control and other services, it did not offer surgical abortions.
Kupsky said City Hall has been swamped with calls and emails from residents who he said are concerned about the new center.
“I have had a lot of calls, emails and messages from people expressing their concern about the facility relocating and the additional services they’re going to offer, and to as why the city is allowing it,” Kupsky said.
At a press conference on the opening of the clinic, Planned Parenthood leaders openly acknowledged creating a shell company to obtain a building permit and turn a former medical office building into the new clinic. Rodriguez said the project needed to be done in secret to protect against protests and other possible delays.
“We needed to make the decision to open this facility in secrecy, just like many other Planned Parenthoods around the country had to do, in order to protect the project and be able to complete it on schedule,” she said. “We know there is so much significant augment needs for family planning and abortion care around our region so we wanted to make sure we’re able to move forward and be here for the patients who need us most.”
Further comment from Planned Parenthood on the secrecy of the project wasn’t immediately available.
The move comes at a time when Missouri has created laws making it one of the most-restrictive abortion states in the country. A Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis — the only remaining clinic that can perform abortions in the state — is fighting to keep its license. The new Fairview Heights Center sits just 13 miles from the border.
Currently, the Hope Clinic in Granite City is the only facility doing surgical abortions in Southern Illinois.
The number of out-of-state residents coming to Illinois for abortion services has increased in recent years. In 2014, there were 2,970 out-of-state residents coming to Illinois for an abortion. In 2017, it was 5,528 out-of-state residents.
Besides women from Illinois, Planned Parenthood expects to service clients from Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri and around the Midwest at the new facility.
City does not plan to fight the project
For the city, Kupsky said he wishes Planned Parenthood had made the city aware of their relocation plans, instead of having to learn about it from the news media.
“I think like anything you always hope that businesses are being upfront and honest with you, and Planned Parenthood has indicated in their interviews they were purposely doing this in secret,” he said. “From our standpoint, we wish we would have known in advance, but there’s not a lot we could have done.”
The city does not plan to fight the project, he said.
Kupsky said since the organization used a limited liability company (LLC) based in Missouri and a contacting company from Tennessee, the city only knew that the building was being renovated for medical use.
He said before Planned Parenthood moved into the building, other medical services were offered in the building. That means the zoning didn’t need to be changed.
The city’s attorney was directed to look into Fairview Heights’ ordinances to make sure nothing was done that was “out-of-line” by Planned Parenthood. Kupsky said no issues had been found as of Thursday.
Even if the city knew about the project, he noted, there isn’t anything it could have done about it. He encouraged residents who were upset to reach out to their state legislators.
He also noted that from the city’s perspective, Planned Parenthood has been in operation for the past 19 years in Fairview Heights. In many ways, its a business relocating to a larger property.
Typically, he pointed out, the city doesn’t know who is moving into certain buildings, especially when they use an LLC.
“We did not necessarily know who the tenant was, but that’s not uncommon,” he said.
Planned Parenthood did not need approval from the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board to relocate.
This story was originally published October 3, 2019 at 3:33 PM.
