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INSIDERS

By Aimee Larrabee |

Mary Ellen Degnan

The Civic Worker

Mary Ellen Degnan is a philanthropist; her philanthropy is the City of Dallas. Most days, she works overtime doing several jobs at once. But she doesn’t earn a salary for any of them. Her foremost responsibility, she says, is as wife and mother of four children. It’s in her spare time that she has become one of Dallas’ most involved civic workers. She’s never been elected to office, but she’s served on numerous boards and commissions and has gained a reputation as a middle-of-the-road representative, bridging the gap between the Establishment and neighborhood forces.

To date, Degnan’s largest public responsibilities are her current position as a member of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) board and a four-year stint as a City Plan Commissioner. She became involved in city government 18 years ago, when, as a new Dallasite transplanted from Boston, a few neighbors asked her to work on a campaign against a zoning request that would allow the construction of a shopping center within their rural neighborhood, which was far north of Dallas (now Far North Dallas). Deg-nan agreed to help in the fight against the zoning change. The result: The neighborhood was able to hold off the change for nearly 20 years.

With that small bit of Dallas politics under her belt, Degnan realized that an individual could make a difference in the workings of the city-something she says she found next to impossible in Boston. Next, she began to work at the grassroots level on several local campaigns and in 1977 received her first board appointment from then-newly elected City Councilmember Adlene Harrison (now chairperson of DART) and in 1979 was appointed to the City Plan Commission (CPC).

During Degnan’s tenure on the CPC, people constantly tried to place her in a philosophical cubbyhole. Some said she was a steadfast neighborhood activist. Others claimed she was a pro-Establishment type, willing to vote for more and more development (after all, she was a Far North Dallas resident).

But Degnan was neither. She says that during her first months as a commissioner, she developed her own set of rules, the basis of which was her belief in “controlled growth’-the reasonable development of existing property. Sometimes, that meant voting to keep neighborhoods intact; other times, voting to allow a developer to build. Occasionally, she voted alone, and at times she upset friends and neighbors. By the end of her tenure on the CPC, Degnan had become “uncubbyholeable” and was popular among neighborhood activists and developers alike.

One of Degnan’s most fervent criteria for controlled growth is proper traffic flow, a stance that drew her to the DART board position. Degnan says that she believes that “DART will work. Our task is to educate Dallasites that they can use public transportation. My concern is whether the people will make it work.”

Leonard Riggs

The Emergency Specialist

Ask physicians about their most grueling rotations during medical school, and many of them will mention their time in “the pit”-the emergency room. Dr. Leonard Riggs is different. The time he spent in the emergency room as a resident enticed him into making emergency care his profession-an unusual decision during the early Seventies. In fact, Riggs says he was one of the first doctors in the nation to concentrate on changing emergency care from being the stepchild of the medical profession into a viable career. He’s made emergency care his business -a profitable business.

When Riggs took a job with Baylor Hospital in 1972, most emergency rooms (he prefers to call them “emergency departments”) were either staffed by interns or on-call doctors of varying specialties. The hours were long, scheduling was sporadic, doctors had little opportunity to familiarize themselves with their patients and the pay wasn’t very good. Worst of all, there were no emergency specialists. At the time, Baylor was beginning to staff its emergency department with specially trained emergency-care physicians, 24 hours a day. It was a rarity for Texas.

Riggs soon became director of Baylor’s emergency department and began work with a relatively new group of doctors, The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). Since the ACEP was so new, Riggs helped write the certification exam for the American Board of Emergency Physicians (another new organization) and served as president of the organization -all while he was still in his 30s.

At Baylor, Riggs made major changes in the hospital’s emergency department: He restructured the patient flow so that people requiring immediate attention could fill out all the necessary insurance and medical forms after they were treated. He updated the surgery equipment, changed the scheduling for the doctors, arranged their incomes on a fee-service basis to help with their work incentives and helped improve the overall look of the emergency room.

Then came his turning point. As president of ACEP, he traveled nearly 200 days a year, while running the Baylor emergency department and trying to maintain his own shifts on duty. “Medicine is an art, a science and a business,” he says. What he realized, at the time, was that quite simply, he didn’t have enough hours to concentrate on all three aspects of his career. He chose business.

Riggs says that most doctors have a hard time being businessmen. Somehow, profit is a dirty word in medicine. But Riggs says that “marketing is the new buzzword in medicine,” and that once he made the choice to focus on his business, he began to prosper. He formed his own company, Em-Care Inc., and began to contract emergency services with other, generally smaller hospitals. Currently, 13 area hospitals use EmCare, which staffs and manages their emergency departments.

Riggs’ company is also in the process of establishing several free-standing clinics that can serve walk-in patients who don’t have life-threatening problems-patients who make up 30 percent of emergency department traffic. Riggs says that people often wander into emergency departments because the facilities are convenient.

Riggs says he knows that some people will scoff at his new venture. Some will call him unprofessional or say that offering this type of service will sever necessary ongoing doctor/patient relationships. But the clinics, he says, won’t be used for ongoing care and the people who use the clinics probably don’t have family physicians. Besides, that’s what the public wants-and isn’t that what business is all about?

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