Nader still a gadfly in place he calls home

Long after he became the nation’s best-known consumer advocate and then a presidential candidate, Ralph Nader kept a hand in the affairs of his boyhood home.

In this proud but faded former mill town stacked against the Berkshire foothills, Nader used his celebrity status and wealth to play a role in issues ranging from managing a local hospital to trying to eliminate fluoride in the town water.

He and his sister, Claire, control two prominent historic buildings in Winsted. One will become a tourist attraction, they say–a tort law museum celebrating the right of ordinary people to sue the powerful.

The Naders also use a multimillion-dollar, tax-exempt charity to fund an Office of the Community Lawyer that they say could be a national model for representing the poor.

Winsted residents praise some Nader efforts, such as the Rowley Street playground, built in part with a $20,000 donation from a Nader family trust.

But whatever the Naders’ intentions, their most ambitious local campaigns have etched a bitter trail through this town with steep side streets and shuttered Main Street storefronts.

The promised tort museum remains a drawing board dream, and the Naders’ other building is an eyesore. Claire Nader has been called secretive and autocratic in her handling of a charity that, with Ralph Nader’s guidance, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from local residents to rescue Winsted Memorial Hospital. And a Nader-paid community lawyer has been accused of bare-knuckle partisan politics–and of pushing the Naders’ agenda instead of the interests of the town.

Community lawyer Charlene LaVoie said her work has been fair and benefited Winsted. Ralph Nader defends what he and his family have done in the town. Claire Nader could not be reached for comment.

“The Naders are controversial in town,” said local businessman Jedd Gould, who supports the family. At the end of a long town meeting, others “might want to go home, but the Naders want to talk about fluoride in the water. They are not shy about making what they consider the right thing happen. That bothers some people.”

But Patsy Renzullo, a lawyer and former Winsted selectman said the Naders “are espousing power to the people and citizen involvement and openness, but in practice it’s totally the opposite.”

Renzullo started as a Nader supporter, serving as a trustee of the Winsted hospital charity Claire Nader spearheaded, but he later joined a group of dissident charity trustees who sued Claire Nader over her handling of the non-profit organization.

“They are absolutely a power-hungry group. It’s democracy `as long as you agree with me,'” Renzullo said.

Winsted, where Ralph Nader still returns to vote, offers a fine-grained portrait of the precocious schoolboy who became an uncompromising consumer safety watchdog and now has launched another presidential candidacy that Democrats fear could ensure a second term for President Bush.

Many of Nader’s friends would like to see the 70-year-old retire and celebrate his towering achievements.

Nader, who burst to national prominence with his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” about the safety problems with General Motors’ Chevrolet Corvair, was instrumental in launching federal laws such as the Wholesome Meat Act, the Clean Air Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

He created a loose group of thriving foundations that research and litigate on behalf of the public. Nader’s books and speeches have delivered him a nice financial cushion. When he ran for president in 2000, he disclosed assets worth between $4.09 million and $4.96 million, and he said his net worth is about the same today.

But the frugal millionaire with the bone-thin face and piercing eyes dismisses the pleas of Democrats who want him to drop his candidacy.

“You don’t run for president and get thousands of volunteers working their heart out for the candidacy, then turn around and say, `Sorry,'” Nader said.

Asked whether there is any possibility that he would drop out, Nader scolded a reporter for seeking clarification.

“How many times do I have to answer the question?” he said. “I can see if you deal with politicians who waffle and say `maybe’ and `I can’t make a decision.’ If somebody gives you a `no’ answer, you go on to the next thing.”

Nader isn’t nearly done. Not with the presidential campaigns he has been waging since 1992. And not with Winsted, a town of about 7,300 that has become a prime laboratory for his experiments in democracy. Here, he remains an outsize figure: defiant and grandiose, crusader and contrarian.

“It is where I grew up. I obviously have an affinity to the people there and the locale,” Nader said. In Winsted civic projects, Nader has typically played an unofficial role, phoning local leaders and newspaper reporters, and organizing fundraisers. Claire Nader more often directs the foundations and community groups he inspires.

“We do a lot of good things,” he said.

But a tour of the Naders’ Winsted is jarring, starting with the hulking shell of their 19th Century carriage house on Hillside Avenue, where broken windows look over tidy homes. Neighbors have complained that pieces of the gabled roof have flown off. Birds and bats navigate the unboarded windows.

“Nothing has changed with regard to this building, except that it has gotten older,” Claire Nader said in a 2003 letter to the town Board of Assessment Appeals. The Naders have owned the building since 1981.

“What’s annoying to most of us in town is that it has the potential to be something very attractive,” said Winsted Selectman David Cappabianca. “A lot of people have been interested in putting something good there.”

About a mile away on Main Street is another Nader building, a huge former factory where proud residents say the casings for Ulysses S. Grant’s coffin were forged. Through a family trust, the Naders bought the plant and they used a $225,000 state grant to refurbish it as a business incubator. But the few tenants in a small portion of the building have been corporations that are funded, directed or registered by Nader family members.

Ralph Nader in 1998 announced the site would be the home of the tort law museum, and trial lawyers quickly donated $1.5 million to refurbish it. But now funding has dried up: Trial lawyers blame Nader for the election of Bush, who has sought to limit the money that can be won by attorneys.

Nader-directed charities in 2002 moved $100,000 to the tort museum fund, and Nader said he collected an additional several hundred thousand dollars in 2003, but he declined to specify where that money came from.

“Why are you bothering me with this thing?” Nader asked. “You have only a certain amount of time with me, and this is what you want to use it for?”

Ralph Nader told the Tribune that the museum renovation would start later this year. But Claire Nader’s letter to the Board of Assessment Appeals said the property is “functionally obsolete and not operational,” and “its future use remains uncertain.”

Ralph Nader calls his most conspicuous local campaign–the effort to rescue Winsted Memorial Hospital–a success. In some ways it was: A health center still occupies the venerable Spencer Street facility. But in the end, the survival was “a triumph in spite of the Naders,” said Dr. Gregg Grinspan, the emergency room director at what is now called Winsted Health Center.

More Top Picks Best Laser Hair Removal Devices

In 1996, the 72-bed hospital saw its in-patient census dwindle to 9.5 people a day, and it faced $300,000 to $500,000 in monthly losses. Hospital officials sought alliances with nearby medical centers and took steps to close the treasured but underused emergency room.

The Naders launched a community group called the Code Blue Committee to keep the hospital open as a stand-alone acute-care site. In speeches and local newspaper interviews, Ralph Nader made blistering, personal attacks on the hospital’s previous administrators, suggesting they deliberately ran it into the ground. State officials investigated and discounted Nader’s charges.

`Stirring the community’

Nader “ended up stirring the community as he demanded the hospital continue to operate as a stand-alone hospital,” said Joseph Barry, a former commissioner with the state Commission on Hospitals and Health Care. “The community got in an uproar.”

Other area hospitals were reluctant to step into the contentious atmosphere. “The result was, the whole place got shut down,” Barry said.

With Phil Donahue as host, a local telethon raised more than $200,000 for the Code Blue Committee, which had morphed into a tax-exempt foundation governed by a 72-person panel of volunteer directors and a 10- to 15-member board of trustees. Claire Nader was the foundation’s driving force, and she exerted enormous influence over its decisions, dissident former trustees said.

“It wasn’t called the Nader Foundation, but they considered it their foundation,” said retired teacher Raymond Pavlak, who was ousted as a trustee in December 2000 after reportedly criticizing Claire Nader.

In 1997, the foundation bought the darkened hospital building from the bankruptcy estate for $200,000. With the foundation acting as landlord, two nearby hospitals reopened the emergency room a year later.

In a move the Naders considered crucial, state authorities included the foundation as an applicant on the hospital’s certificate of need–the permit that specifies which services the medical facility can offer. That seemingly symbolic listing gave the foundation a voice in how the hospital would be run.

To manage the hospital foundation–as well as the American Museum of Tort Law– the Naders brought in a controversial business consultant, Fred Hyde.

A former “Nader Raider” activist, Hyde offers consulting and management services to financially troubled hospitals. Nader calls him “probably the smartest man in America in dealing with recovering failed hospitals.”

Hyde is “as honest as can be, he’s extremely competent and result-oriented,” Nader said.

2 views of consultant

But Hyde also has drawn the scrutiny of state hospital regulators and has been the subject of lawsuits alleging misconduct. Before arriving in Winsted, he was president and CEO of another Connecticut hospital, Windham Community Memorial Hospital.

State authorities concluded that Hyde’s administration improperly used $1.8 million worth of restricted endowments to pay for Windham’s day-to-day and construction expenses. Windham later agreed to repay the $1.8 million plus interest.

Hyde “spent the place almost into bankruptcy,” said Barry, who oversaw the state investigation into Windham.

Hyde defends his decisions at Windham, which were approved by the hospital’s board, and says of the state investigation: “Nothing came of it.” He calls the state health-care regulators “a tool of the larger hospitals to try and capture capital at the expense of the smaller hospitals.”

From 1997 through 2001, the Winsted hospital foundation and a wholly owned subsidiary paid Hyde a total of more than $400,000 to serve as its sole staffer, charity tax filings show. The job was “very part time,” Hyde acknowledges.

Hyde “controlled the checkbook of the foundation–it was almost a one-man show,” said former trustee Richard Munch, a retired urologist. “That was unnerving to me. I felt it was inappropriate that he should have so much influence.”

Some trustees and doctors also questioned Hyde’s decisions. In 2000, as the two hospitals providing health services at Winsted Health Center faced heavy financial losses, an orthopedic surgeons group approached the hospital foundation about leasing space for a for-profit surgical clinic. The orthopedic surgeons would have employed nurses and support staff, thus helping sustain the emergency room.

“Fred Hyde and Claire got in the way of that,” Grinspan said. “They believed a for-profit entity should not be at the non-profit facility.” Their decisions “undermined the viability of the medical facility.”

After a hearing in 2001, the Connecticut Office of Health Care Access stripped the Nader-directed foundation from the hospital’s certificate of need, saying its role “in the maintenance of buildings” did not entitle the foundation to make major decisions about medical programs. A pending lawsuit seeks to overturn the state commission’s decision.

In 2002, five dissident foundation trustees–including Renzullo, Munch and Pavlak–filed a lawsuit in Litchfield Judicial District Superior Court alleging that Claire Nader and her “clique” had used administrative maneuvers to exclude critics.

A judge struck down parts of the lawsuit on the grounds that the dissident trustees did not name all 72 volunteer directors in court pleadings, and the dissident trustees were forced to withdraw the suit.

The Naders dismissed the protests of the dissidents as sour grapes from a disgruntled minority. “It was a completely unsubstantiated lawsuit,” Ralph Nader said. “You see, in a small town, you get a lot of personality conflicts,” he said. “They were lucky not to have been sued back.”