Rocks steps down as $1M NHS boss; Martz, Bilson advance

NHS Human Services, Lafayette Hill, which employs more than 10,000 at nearly 700 mental-health group homes and other government-funded facilities from New York to Louisiana, says former state Sen. M. Joseph Rocks, R-Phila., is stepping down as the mostly nonprofit institution's chairman and chief executive officer at the end of the year. Tax records show Rocks was paid around $1 million last year, not unusual among hospital-chain CEOs.

Rocks, who ran NHS for 14 years and expanded the former Northwest Human Services into six other states, with a yearly budget of more than $500 million, will be replaced by Joseph S. Martz, executive director and secretary at Philadelphia's Board of City Trusts. NHS declined to say what Martz will be paid.

Martz previously served terms as the city's managing director under former Mayors Ed Rendell and John Street. He also worked for government IT contractor ACS Corp., for Elliott-Lewis, a labor-services firm whose clients include the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and for military contractor Lockheed Martin. In a statement, Rocks said Martz was unanimously selected by a search group that included former Philadelphia Stock Exchange chair and mayoral candidate John J. Egan Jr., lawyer Robert N.C. Nix III and Dr. Thomas Saporito, CEO of RHR International.

Under Martz's watch, the Board of City Trusts has laid off staff, reduced enrollment and plans to suspend for a time the overnight boarding program at Girard College, one of the city's best-known charities. Martz blames Girard cuts on rising expenses compared to the value of the board's investments in real estate and other assets, originally a legacy to the city from trade magnate, banker, railroad, coal and port developer Stephen Girard, Philadelphia's first millionaire.

Wills Eye Hospital, another city-controlled charity that has survived from the 1800s, has fared better in recent years. Wills' President since 2007, Joseph Bilson, will replace Martz as executive director of the Board of City Trusts.

In an interview last year, Bilson told me Wills had thrived thanks to crucial decisions in the early 1990s to "build a string of [for-profit] ambulatory service centers," in the suburbs, which he led from about 1993-2006. The clinics sent patients to Wills' updated campus, next to Thomas Jefferson University, funded through bond borrowi9ng. Unlike Girard, Wills relies mostly on patient revenues, not investment income, to fund its $47 million annual budget, which includes around $1.7 million in free care.