The Suburban General Hospital Advisory Board has sued the West Penn Allegheny Health System in an attempt to prevent Friday's looming closure of the Bellevue hospital's emergency room and inpatient care operations, arguing that the original 1994 merger agreement guarantees it will remain an acute care hospital.

"Suburban General was the community hospital for all of the north boroughs for many years and to shut it down would be devastating," Gary Hunt, one of the advisory board's attorneys, said Monday. "We believe we have an agreement with West Penn-Allegheny General that they can't shut down the hospital."

The advisory board, made up of four residents and officials with long-standing ties to the hospital, filed the lawsuit Friday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court and asked for a preliminary injunction to stop the shutdown, scheduled for this Friday, Mr. Hunt said.

The lawsuit alleges breach of contract by the West Penn health system arguing that it violated the 1994 affiliation agreement.

If the health system were allowed to shut the hospital down and convert it to a long-term acute care facility, "I just feel that it would hurt the community, from the loss of services of the hospital," said Paul Cusick, former Bellevue mayor and vice president of the hospital advisory board.

The other advisory board members are James Pinkerton, a former local funeral home owner who signed the original merger agreement in 1994; Thomas J. Jackson Jr., a retired attorney who represented Suburban General when the 1994 agreement was drawn up and was chairman of the hospital board for five years; and Edward Dietz, a local florist.

The advisory board was largely inactive in recent years and was reactivated in April when West Penn Allegheny began talking about a possible closure in Bellevue.

According to the lawsuit, because of the 1994 merger agreement, WPAHS is obligated to provide $250,000 in funds for the advisory board that Mr. Hunt believes was included in the agreement "in large part to be able to enforce the obligations of the agreement."

The lawsuit was filed after the Suburban Health Foundation board, which does fundraising for the hospital, had reached an agreement in recent weeks not to sue West Penn Allegheny.

"The foundation board feels that in the current medical environment and the restraints you have on health operations -- from both the federal government and state -- that changes have to occur in different facilities," Dawn Landis, the foundation's chairwoman. "And we're operating under the belief that the system is doing what would be best for the system and the community at large."

After West Penn Allegheny announced its intentions in May to shut down Suburban General as an acute care hospital, the foundation met numerous times to discuss its legal options.

But, ultimately, Ms. Landis said, it came down to the big picture: "Do you do something like this and possibly affect the other hospitals in the system negatively or do you think that Suburban can continue to exist as a good hospital with only 15 inpatients?"

West Penn Allegheny spokesman Dan Laurent said the health system would not comment on the lawsuit, but added in a statement: "Our plan for the AGH Suburban Campus was established after extensive, careful deliberation about how we could best serve the Bellevue community on a long-term basis. We appreciate that the Suburban Health Foundation and its community-based board has endorsed this plan and we fully intend to proceed with the necessary changes that we have announced."

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.