DALTON, Ga. — The terminated lease of an affordable community clinic has North Georgia residents facing an uncertain — and potentially critical — future.

Local resident Melissa Tousignant said she wouldn’t be alive today if it were not for staff at the Partnership Health Center, a low-cost clinic inside the Mack Gaston Community Center in Dalton.

It was during a yearly check-up last July that problems were discovered during her Pap smear. She said she was in the beginning stages of cervical, uterine and ovarian cancer and needed a hysterectomy.

“If I had not gone there I wouldn’t have known and by the time I found out I might’ve needed chemo,” she said. “Because it was caught early, I was able to have a hysterectomy.”

Tousignant, 38, said she gets one free wellness check-up through Medicaid a year and goes to the clinic because it’s the only place she can afford. 

“The clinic can’t close,” she said. “I don’t know how I will get my medication. I can’t afford to pay what the doctors want in other places.”  

For the past five years, the Partnership Health Center has provided low-cost health care to low-income patients. But the clinic’s future in Dalton is unknown.

On May 9, Dalton Mayor Dennis Mock sent a letter to Georgia Mountain Health Services, the Morganton-based nonprofit agency that operates the center, saying the city was terminating the agency’s lease. Georgia Mountain Health Services, which pays $1 a year for its offices in the community center, also operates low-cost Georgia clinic locations in Chatsworth, Blue Ridge, Dahlonega and Ellijay. The clinic’s lease expires at midnight on July 31. 

Mock’s letter did not specify why the lease was terminated.

“We’ve had some concerns about whether they have been open the hours they should be,” Mock said last week. “We’ve sent some city employees over there for drug testing and they weren’t open, so we’d have to send them back and lose more time.”

Greg Dent, executive director of the Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership, said Mock approached him “a couple of days ago” about finding some way to serve people without health insurance in the space occupied by the Partnership Health Center after the lease was terminated. The Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership helped bring the federally-funded clinic to the city in 2012.

“We have been talking to members of the local medical community,” Dent said. “We think we might be able to craft a plan to fill the vacancy.”

Joy Harrell lives within walking distance of the clinic and said location is one reason she became a patient there.

“I don’t drive and it’s very convenient to walk here,” she said. “Plus I think Dr. (Wiley) Smith is a great doctor.”

Smith is the lone doctor at the clinic. 

Harrell has insurance, but said she likes the sliding scale option at the clinic for those who are not insured. She said it’s “terrible” the clinic will close.

Rosalinda Fuentes has seven children between the ages of 1 and 21. She and five of them use the Partnership Health Center. All are uninsured.

Fuentes, 35, of Dalton said if the clinic closes on July 31 as planned she’ll be forced to go the Chatsworth location about 30 minutes away. Fuentes said at the Dalton location staff is “more concerned about what you need.” She said her family has been going to the clinic for at least four years. 

Melissa Roldan, a receptionist at Partnership Health Center, said many patients are unaware the clinic is closing. Staff members are telling patients as they come in for appointments that their follow-up may be in another location.

“We’re sad they’re planning to close the clinic and worried for our patients,” Roldan said. “There are some patients concerned about not having a doctor in Dalton who offers services at a discounted price.” 

Dalton City Council member Gary Crews said he has several questions about the closing of the clinic.

“As a council, we are going to have to spend some time discussing where we are, how we got here and what we need to do,” he said.

 “If we do change the health care situation, we need to see what sort of process we need to go through for a request for proposals,” Crews said. “But I don’t think there’s any intention that we will not have some sort of clinic there. We will have some sort of health care provider in there. I don’t doubt that.”

A Daily Citizen-News open records request found a series of emails in April and early May between city officials and Georgia Mountain Health Services officials about a data breach of city employees’ records. Georgia Mountain Health Services CEO Steve Miracle said a list of names of city employees who had been sent to the center for drug testing had been found in the county landfill. He said the list was from 2013 and he doesn’t know how it got there. He said city officials did not indicate that played a role in the decision to end the lease.

Asked if the data breach that was discovered in April was reason enough to terminate the lease, Crews said “I think their failure to renew the lease could be a reason,” he said.

The lease would have renewed for another five years if Georgia Mountain Health Services had sent notice not less than 90 days before the end of the lease. Miracle acknowledges he did not do that.

“That was our oversight,” Miracle said Saturday. “But given the work that we are doing, and nobody has said anything bad about the care that we provide to the people of that community, even if we did not take the steps to renew the agreement, which we did not, I can’t believe that somebody didn’t come to us and say, ‘Do you intend to continue there?’”

Roldan said for the sake of patients and staff, she’s “praying something works out in the end.”

“We’re waiting on the CEO to find a different office or tell us if we have to go to Chatsworth,” she said. 

Staff writer Charles Oliver contributed to this story. Cobb writes for the Dalton, Georgia Daily Citizen.