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To the Editor:
As the Albany County Legislature begins its deliberations on the lease agreement between the county and the Upstate Services Group for the operation of the Albany County Nursing Home, I wanted to provide some detail on what my office is doing to bring all the facts to light when it comes to the nursing home.
Over the past few years, I have spent a significant amount of time discussing the future of the nursing home with the public, legislators, and the media. I have worked with legislative leaders Chairman Shawn Morse, Majority Leader Frank Commisso, and Minority Leader Christine Benedict to ensure that we are protecting our seniors and our taxpayers and are accepting financial responsibility as we consider this agreement with USG.
I have made it clear that the lease agreement ensures that the nursing home will continue to serve the current patients and carry out existing admission policies, which means the facility will continue to serve as a safety net for our seniors.
In my view, moving forward with USG as the operator gives us an opportunity to keep the facility open and to undertake some capital improvements that are needed.
It goes without saying that the patients at the nursing home are well cared for by the staff at the nursing home and that will continue with USG as the operator. However, the facility’s infrastructure badly needs repair.
For the last two years, our budget planning has been hampered by trying to mitigate the impact of mandates, reductions in reimbursements from the state and federal government, and costs that are beyond our control. Despite our best effort, the nursing home continues to negatively impact county finances, with a deficit of $7 million to $9 million annually.
At a time of fiscal uncertainty, this has proven to be problematic for the county and for taxpayers. For the past two years, the county has been unable to craft a budget that would be under the 2-percent property tax cap. Simply said, costs are increasing too rapidly for us to keep up. We need a solution to this problem now.
That is why I support moving forward with the lease agreement with USG to take over operations of the nursing home. From the beginning of the process, I have been committed to working with the legislature to ensure we protect seniors and the taxpayers and that we finally accept responsibility for the nursing home by recognizing that the economic realities of running this facility are untenable.
We have explored other options and we have not been successful. It is time for us to move forward to ensure that the patients and taxpayers are protected.
Our agreement with USG does that and more.
In order to ensure that the process was conducted openly and with transparency, we held five open forums with county legislators. While not all of them chose to attend the sessions, I believe that it was my duty to bring the stakeholders together to discuss the nursing home.
Before the first session was held, I provided a copy of the agreement to the leadership and the legislators, which is something that has not been done in the past. I did that to facilitate a thorough review of the agreement while providing an opportunity for the legislators to ask questions about the agreement.
The days of putting tough decisions off until tomorrow are over. We cannot defer moving forward on this plan. Too much depends on it. We have to do what is right, for the nursing home patients, for their families, and for the 300,000 residents of Albany County.
Daniel P. McCoy
Albany County Executive