Rexburg City Hall and Madison Memorial Hospita

Getting the information for this story seemed really easy at first but it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought. First I had to find an angle and that is when I opened the press release from Rexburg cities main Web site about City hall sharing office space with Madison Memorial hospital. There was only one person that I could contact that was listed on the press release but I tried it. I also used information from the Web site to send out emails to the people who were in charge of the changes that were being made to City Hall and Madison Memorial hospital.
I really thought that the only changes were, that they would just be making more room for the hospital but the significance of the whole situation was over my head until I did the research and wrote the story to figure out how much of a benefit the changes would have on the community.
So after sending out emails I gave it a few days for a response. And I even tried my hand at emailing the Mayor of Rexburg and he actually emailed me back within 24 hours with the Press Release attached and a little note telling me that he had forwarded the email to the main person in charge and that he was grateful for my interest on the subject.
The press release was really helpful but the email that I received from Kristy Geisler, the community affairs director, helped to clear up any misconstrued ideas that I had previously held. There were still some details that I needed and I wanted to get a perspective from the hospital so that story wouldn’t contain any biases.
So I contacted Jennifer Steinmetz, who is in charge of public relations at the Madison Memorial hospital, and she gave me even more details and supplied answers to my questions about the hospital involvement in the situation.
I now know that Madison Memorial Hospital is taking over the existing Rexburg city hall and there is a brand new city hall being built that will house all of the departments. This at first seemed really insignificant to me and I thought it was a waste of money but then through email and phone conversation I found out that this venture could be successful for everyone in Rexburg, including college students.
With the growth of BYU—Idaho there has been a lack of space and so this will help the hospital to fulfill the need. City hall has actually had the funds to make these changes for a while but now they are going to be able to put that money to use and make a profit by selling the existing Rexburg City Hall to the Madison Memorial Hospital and are creating more space for themselves and city hall.