By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Concern is growing about potential job losses at Lifespan, the nonprofit parent of major medical facilities including Rhode Island Hospital that is the state’s largest private employer, WPRI.com has learned.

A Lifespan spokeswoman confirmed Friday morning that the hospital chain is experiencing a financial shortfall, saying its finances ran “significantly below budget” during the first five months of its current fiscal year.

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• Related: Will Steward make Landmark more like a Cheesecake Factory? (Aug. 21)

Read all about it - a productive 24 hours for the mayor, with a balanced budget now suddenly within reach.

Here’s an interesting chart city officials gave out on Thursday afternoon at a hearing on a bill to force tax-exempt institutions to pay 25% of the tax bill they’d owe if their property was taxable. It shows the latest assessments of property owned by the seven largest, led by Brown University and Lifespan hospital group:

• Related: Moody’s: Cities must balance tax-exempts’ cash, contributions (Feb. 15)

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras acknowledged Saturday he has no way of knowing how many of the capital city’s 4,300 retirees will agree to voluntary concessions in their pensions and retiree health benefits and isn’t certain how many of them must explicitly agree for any deal to be binding.

“I know it’s not going to be unanimous by any means,” Taveras told WPRI.com at City Hall on Saturday afternoon following this morning’s meeting with retirees. “I’m not even certain it will be a majority. … You can reach a binding agreement with unions; this is a much different situation.”

The mayor declined to offer a specific target for the number of retirees he hopes will go along with his proposal. Last summer, Central Falls receiver Robert Flanders asked retirees there to approve voluntary reductions in their benefits, but too few agreed to the deep cuts proposed for the plan to move forward. The city filed for bankruptcy Aug. 1.

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Moody’s Investors Service thinks Providence and other cities could reap significant rewards from pushing local tax-exempt institutions to fork over more money. But they should guard against killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTS, “represent a potential revenue boon for local governments with high concentrations of tax-exempt properties in their tax bases, many of which are in the Northeast,” Moody’s analysts wrote in a research note Tuesday that singled out Boston as a successful example.

“Though far from immanent, greater PILOT revenue comes with long-term risks for some local governments should PILOTs grow so large that they impair not-for-profits’ ability to create jobs and stimulate the economy, or encourage them to move elsewhere,” Moody’s said, adding: “In general, local governments are still far from that tipping point.”

“Efforts by local governments to bolster PILOTs appear to be shaping into a trend,” according to Moody’s. In addition to Providence and Boston, Scranton, Pa.; Worcester, Mass.; Framingham, Mass.; and Newton, Mass., have all sought larger voluntary payments recently.

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Is Providence biting the hands that feed its residents?

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and his aides certainly don’t see it that way. But the seven tax-exempt institutions they’re targeting for a bigger contribution to Providence’s budget employ one in five workers there, making each of them one of its main employers, city documents show.

The gang of seven are Brown University, Lifespan (Rhode Island and The Miriam hospitals), Care New England (Women & Infants and Butler hospitals), CharterCARE (Roger Williams Medical Center and St. Joseph Health Services), Providence College, Johnson & Wales University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Those seven tax-exempts employed 20,837 workers in Providence in 2011, which was 19.5% of total city employment, according to R.I. Economic Development Corporation data city auditors prepared for bondholders. Brown is the city’s No. 1 employer with 5,162 workers, or 4.83% of total city employment.

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Rhode Island Hospital’s parent company paid its CEO $9.5 million in 2009, but the industry’s top lobbyist says that doesn’t mean Providence’s hospitals can afford to start contributing money to the city budget.

“You have to look at the role hospitals play in their community,” Ed Quinlan, president of the Hospital Association of Rhode Island, told WPRI.com on Thursday. “Executive compensation is determined by hospital boards based on the financial performance of the hospital, based on the financial stability of the hospital – there’s multiple factors.”

Local hospital chain Lifespan’s CEO George Vecchione earned $9.5 million in fiscal 2009, after getting paid $3.2 million in 2008 and just under $3 million in 2007, federal income tax filings show. House Speaker Gordon Fox cited Vecchione’s compensation on “Newsmakers” last month as evidence that all nonprofits should contribute.

Quinlan declined to say whether a portion of the money Lifepsan uses to pay Vecchione should be redirected to the city that’s home to three of its hospitals: Rhode Island, Hasbro Children’s and The Miriam. ”I couldn’t respond to a specific case, because I’m not party to those discussions,” he said.

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The nonprofit group that runs three Rhode Island Hospitals including Women & Infants won’t say whether its new chief executive will receive a seven-figure pay package that matches his predecessor’s.

Care New England tapped Cambridge Health Alliance CEO Dennis Keefe as its new president and CEO this week. He will succeed John Hynes, who is retiring, in August.

Care New England spokeswoman May Kernan said the organization would not release details about Keefe’s compensation. ”Other than complying with public reporting requirements as part of the federal [IRS] 990 forms, we do not disclose personal salary information,” she told WPRI.com in an email.

Hynes’ compensation totaled $1.5 million in 2008-09, up from $873,332 in 2007-08, tax records show.

Hynes was the region’s fourth-highest-paid hospital executive in a survey done last year. Lifespan CEO George Vecchione made the most: $9.5 million in 2008-09, up from $3.2 million in 2007-08, according to tax records. Lifespan’s facilities include Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital.

The colleges and hospitals in Providence get lumped together a lot. (I know I do it.) Often that makes sense – they’re two sets of powerful, wealthy, not-for-profit institutions whose presences are felt throughout the city.

But in other ways, they’re different – and Mike Stanton’s terrific Projo profile of Mayor Angel Taveras offers me an opportunity to point out a key distinction of which I’m not sure many people are aware (emphasis mine):

Taveras says talks have intensified with the city’s nonprofit hospitals and universities about contributing more ….

Another test will be his efforts to collect more from the city’s nonprofit hospitals and universities. Taveras says he must balance the city’s financial plight with the role that those institutions play in helping the city and state develop a “knowledge economy” in the old Jewelry District and on the downtown land freed up by the Route 195 relocation. …

Brown president Ruth Simmons says that charging nonprofits, such as Brown … could force the university to lay off employees, while overlooking Brown’s value to the city as an economic engine.

Still, she praises the new mayor’s intelligence and toughness, says that his decisions seem based on facts, not politics, and welcomes “a fact-driven discussion.”

Here’s the thing: The Cicilline administration’s 2003 deal to get $50 million in voluntary payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) over the next 20 years only included the four private colleges. The schools also pay taxes on some non-exempt properties and reimburse the city for police and fire services. The three types of direct payments totaled $7.9 million in 2009-10, according to their association.

By contrast, the big hospitals – Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam, both owned by Lifespan; Women & Infants and Butler, owned by Care New England; and Roger Williams Medical Center, now owned by CharterCARE – don’t have any PILOT agreement with the city, and thus don’t make any direct contribution to its budget.

“There are no formal payments,” Amanda Barney, a spokeswoman for the Hospital Association of Rhode Island, told me. ”It’s all in the form of the benefit that [the hospitals] provide to the community through employment, uncompensated care and those sorts of things.” Of course, the colleges point out that they provide indirect benefits of their own.

I raise this because lumping the universities and the hospitals together doesn’t seem particularly fair to the schools or particularly helpful as the city grapples with its financial crisis.

In this case, Brown President Ruth Simmons is standing in for all the nonprofits – but she did agree to the 2003 deal, which the hospital executives haven’t done.

What, for instance, does Lifespan CEO George Vecchione think should happen? He made an astonishing $9.3 million in 2009 - an amount equal to one-third of Providence’s $29 million budget deficit this year. (Simmons earned a comparatively paltry $884,771, IRS filings show.)

On a less populist note, the final report [pdf] released last fall by the Providence City Council’s Commission to Study Tax-Exempt Institutions estimated a gap of up to $6.2 million between the city’s revenue from tax-exempts and the cost of providing services to those organizations. Vecchione could cover that and still keep $3.1 million.

The commission offered Providence a range of suggestions, including pushing the General Assembly to appropriate more PILOT reimbursement money or using Boston’s model, which allows nonprofits to itemize the services it provides the community to show how it makes up for part of the foregone property-tax revenue. It also suggested negotiating a PILOT payment with the hospitals mirroring the one with the universities.

For the record, the report found the nine “major tax-exempt institutions now own 15% of the land within the city (23% of all non-public land),” with an assessed value of $3.1 billion. It also included this neat map comparing the footprint of tax-exempt properties in 1985 and 2005:

(map: Providence City Council)