By NEAL WAGNER / Managing Editor

ALABASTER – Alabaster’s Shelby Baptist Medical Center will avoid paying for an Alabaster business license covering the last three months of 2015 after the City Council agreed to transfer the hospital’s original 2015 business license to SBMC’s new parent company.

Baptist Health System, which owns Shelby Baptist, finalized its merger with Tenet Healthcare in early October, forming a new joint venture between the two companies.

The joint venture includes all Baptist Health System hospitals, including Shelby Baptist, Tenet’s Brookwood Medical Center and each organization’s related businesses. Under the joint venture arrangement, Tenet, which previously was the parent company of Brookwood, will be the majority partner and will manage the network’s operations. Baptist Health System previously was a non-profit organization, but the new joint company will be a for-profit entity.

Because the hospital changed ownership when the joint venture was formed, Alabaster regulations required the hospital to purchase a new business license to cover the last three months of the year.

Business license costs are tied to a company’s revenue, meaning the hospital would have paid $27,750 for a new 2015 business license following the merger, according to Baptist Health System Vice President External and Governmental Affairs Ross Mitchell. At the beginning of 2015, the company purchased an about $37,000 business license, and is set to purchase a new 2016 business license at the beginning of 2016, Mitchell said.

“Our business license burden would be higher for this year than it will be next year when the rate goes up (if we purchase a new 2015 license to cover the merger),” Mitchell told council members during a Dec. 17 work session.

After discussing the matter, the City Council voted to transfer Shelby Baptist’s original 2015 business license to cover the hospital’s new ownership “given this unique set of circumstances related to the city’s sole hospital,” read the resolution.

SBMC still must purchase a full 2016 business license at the beginning of the year.

“We virtually have the same business here,” Ward 5 Councilman Russell Bedsole said. “This is so unique. I’m OK with us just transferring the business license.”