CAMBRIDGE — Andrew Cann applauded loudly Friday morning after hearing a plan to cut $11 million and shed 85 jobs at Cambridge Memorial Hospital.

It wasn’t so much the content the Cambridge man was cheering, but the fact the hospital was finally listening to citizens like him, instead of ignoring them.

“It was a fiefdom up there. It was accountable to nobody,” he said after a town hall meeting Friday hosted by Murray Martin, the provincial supervisor appointed to run the hospital.

Other question-and-answer-sessions about the budget-busting plan were set for noon, 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. at the Cambridge Hotel and Conference Centre, 700 Hespeler Rd.

About 20 taxpayers were at the 10 a.m. session. Murray faced no criticism of his plan — approved Thursday night by the Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network — although there were many questions.

The mood was supportive.

Martin was put in place in early September, after an outside review faulted hospital management as the facility faced an illegal $5.6 million budget deficit this year.

Cann said he called Martin and left a message for him after he was appointed to fix things.

“You called me back,” he said. “I said there’s been a problem down at the hospital.”

The public meetings on the cost-cutting plan also pleased Cann, because it treated the public with respect. When Martin said the hospital must be financially stable before the province would ever help pay for a long-promised expansion, Cann agreed.

“If I was the government, I wouldn’t have put any money in the hospital, either,” Cann said.

Martin expects the province to announce redevelopment of Cambridge Memorial in March, when a 10-year, province-wide capital spending plan is announced.

The hospital cost-cutting plan includes:

•Closing 32 beds for patients awaiting transfer to long-term-care facilities. This is intended to be offset by improvements in home care and shifting the service to Kitchener (Freeport Health Care Village) and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Guelph.

•Merging the oncology and palliative-care wards, and the pediatrics ward and the nursery for newborns.

•Moving some outpatient programs, such as cardiac rehabilitation, to other providers in the community.

•Making more use of registered practical nurses, who earn less than registered nurses.

•Creating a 10-bed, “short-stay” surgical ward, and reducing weekend stays of non-emergency surgical patients.