For years now, UMass Memorial Medical Center and the UMass Chan Medical School have been locked in a bitter legal dispute over the sale of the hospital's pharmacy business. The pharmacy, called Shield's Health Solutions, was sold to Walgreens in 2019, reportedly for $263 million. The medical school is claiming the hospital owes it $40 million from that sale due to a provision in a 1997 legal agreement between the hospital and the university system. For more details, GBH' All Things Considered host Arun Rath spoke with Noah Bombard, the senior managing editor at MassLive, who spent monthsinvestigating this dispute and recentlysued the University of Massachusetts for records they've been withholding from the public on this case. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: Could you flesh out a bit more for us how these two instituitions got so entrenched in this dispute?

Noah Bombard: Well, as you said, it goes back a couple of years, and it's actually surprising that it hadn't gotten out sooner. These two institutions, by state law, are supposed to be supporting each other. So, the UMass Memorial health system is the hospital and all of those facilities, and the medical school is under the University of Massachusetts. And they're supposed to support each other — but in this particular case, there has been a rift there.

Our sources tell us the rift has been there for years, but really has erupted around this one issue with the sale of the pharmacy aspect. This is part of a venture company that was created in part with UMass and they sold off their part of it.

It is important to mention that the hospital system had been in losses year after year. In 2018, they lost $28.4 million. So, the sale of this specialty pharmacy really helped bolster them. The following year, they had $197.5 million gain.

So, a lot going on here. And what our sources say is that there have been attempts to solve this and there have been some suggestions of how to move forward, but they haven't. They've been locked in. Our sources also tell us that the two institutions have spent millions of dollars in legal fees battling this out. You've got a nonprofit institution and you've got a taxpayer-funded institution both spending millions of dollars on two high-priced Boston legal teams to battle this out with seemingly no end in sight.

Rath: In terms of reporting this, how did this first come to light? You said this wasn't really much on the public record. Tell us a bit about how you've been investigating it since then.

Bombard: Yeah, as most good stories come to us, that came to us initially from an anonymous tip, and we were able to spend several months talking with with our sources to confirm details from that tip. Both institutions have been tight-lipped. They don't want to say anything about this. We were able to get a few documents that were leaked to us by sources, and we were able to to confirm the validity of those documents that showed that the situation had gotten to a point where the board for the hospital system was trying to meet with its attorneys to talk about this issue and the arbitration that was going on. The problem is that several of the board members are from the university side. So, the letters from the attorneys that we were able to acquire showed this moment in time where the board is trying to meet with its attorneys, and the university is saying, "Well, our board members need to be there." And the hospital is saying, "Well, they can't be there because we're here to talk about litigation that you initiated." The hospital board ended up meeting with its attorneys without the university board members present, but it really just showed how bad things had gone.

Rath: I don't want to sound naive, but one would like to think that public institutions should be fairly open to public scrutiny. How unusual is this degree of stonewalling, if it's fair to call it that?

Bombard: It's very unusual. I will say that this is where the story takes a turn. So — as in typical practice when we're investigating something like this — the hospital system is a nonprofit, so we don't have access to their records. However, the university is a taxpayer-funded institution, and so typically, as journalists or any member of the public, we have access to request documents from the university. We requested emails about this battle going back and forth, and we requested a number of other things, including just quite simply, receipts on legal expenses. How much taxpayer money has the University of Massachusetts spent battling this litigation? All of that was denied by the university.

We did appeal to the secretary of state's public records office, and initially, the response we got was that the university's declining of our requests didn't meet the standards of state law, and they were ordered to reply again. So, it's gotten us to a point now where we have taken the university to court. We have filed a complaint there to seek the records that we're looking for.

Rath: Do you have a sense of where things might go from here? Has there been any more involvement from public officials or elected leaders?

Bombard: Yeah, it's in the court hands at this point, and we're waiting to get a hearing date on that. Our hope, of course, is that the court recognizes the importance of access to these records and that they are, in fact, public records and should be turned over. The university has said that they're in arbitration, so they feel that the records should not be handed over.

Our argument is that these records will not impact arbitration. The records that we're seeking, the emails that we're seeking, are from the opposing side. The opposing side presumably already knows what they've sent. So, nothing is going to be revealed internally between the two parties that they don't already know. The receipts are, again, taxpayer dollars that have been spent. If we don't have access to those, if the public can't see that, these institutions can go on battling each other, spending this money indefinitely. Part of the reason now for us wanting to get those records is to really pinpoint now exactly how much is being spent and raise the question of whether or not a solution should be sought much sooner.

Rath: So, if you, an investigative reporter, didn't know about this going on, does it seem safe to assume that elected leaders didn't know this was going on? And do you anticipate any kind of response? Has there been any?

Bombard: Yes, we talked to a number of elected officials when we were working on this story. Most of them had no idea this was going on. It really was incredible to us that it had been kept so quiet, given that the entire board of trustees for the University of Massachusetts had been involved in these discussions. There was a very concerted effort to not get this out there. We felt that we had a responsibility to dig into it and to get the public's involvement. This is a public institution and a nonprofit institution and we think that the public has a vested interest in knowing what's going on here.

Rath: Great work. It's been great talking with you about this. Thank you.

Bombard: Thank you.