In Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue's impassioned State of the City address to the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, he said, "Imagining a great city has turned into reality in many ways."

Mayor Donohue is committed to fulfilling the great promise of Salinas with economic gains and a program for a more peaceful city. But Salinas is also the birthplace of a unique grass-roots effort to solve the local health-care crisis.

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors, Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System and Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula have embarked upon a unique, innovative and cooperative effort to deal with the financial crisis at Natividad Medical Center, the county hospital in Salinas.

Not only have SVMH and CHOMP extended healthcare expertise and leadership to the Natividad board of trustees, but they have contributed the millions of dollars necessary for the Huron Consulting contract. (Huron has been contracted to help Natividad bring its finances back into balance). This is truly a health-care fix not to be undervalued - a public- private partnership to maintain the health-care "safety net" in Monterey County.

The reduction in operating losses by $17 million compared to last year at this time is a healthy start for the two-year contract of the Huron consultant team. Much work lies ahead for the consultants and employees of Natividad, but the hospital is well on its way to becoming a model for other counties dealing with the care of a disproportionate number of uninsured patients.

Only a handful of county hospitals remain in California, and all are struggling to survive the chronic shortfall in state and federal funding while caring for increasing numbers of uninsured patients. The hospital's ability to continue care for the disproportionate numbers of uninsured and underinsured people is critical to the health of Monterey County and the bottom-line health of the other area hospitals.

The tragic drama recently played out in the emergency department of Los Angeles County's Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center with the death of a patient apparently overlooked by staff is a horrific reminder of what can result from a broken health-care system and certainly exemplifies the worst ills of health care in this country.

In the months ahead, we can anticipate a relentless media onslaught of healthcare horror stories, hasty proposals and grandiose solutions. Moviemaker Michael Moore's take on the need for a single-payer system of health care is garnering a lot of media attention with his appropriately titled documentary, "Sicko." The presidential campaigns also are forcing us to think about health-care fixes.

It is unlikely there will ever be unlimited health care. Many of us have been moved to think of ways to do more to help each other.

Thanks to the vision of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors and the cooperative financial and leadership support from SVMH and CHOMP, Natividad is showing signs of healing itself and putting Salinas on the map as the place where the local health-care community, determined to maintain its health-care safety net, worked together to make it reality.