Foley nursing home enters its final month

The day many public health advocates thought would never come -- the closure of Suffolk's John J. Foley Skilled Nursing Facility -- now appears to be less than a month away.

County Executive Steve Bellone is targeting June 30 for moving the last remaining patient out of the Yaphank center, bringing an end to a protracted, politically charged battle that has spanned nearly 25 years and four administrations.

"Our goal is as early as possible," Bellone said. "We're doing everything to save as much money as possible."

After all of the failed privatization efforts, lawsuits and union protests, the cash-strapped county on July 1 will likely be left with just a 170,000-square-foot building on four acres.

Bellone, a Democrat -- like his Republican predecessor, Steve Levy -- calls operating Foley a $1 million-a-month drain at a time when the county budget deficit approaches $250 million by the end of 2014.

"The only thing worse" than closure, Bellone said in his State of the County speech this year, "would be to continue to ask taxpayers to subsidize this facility to the tune of millions of dollars at a time when we have no money."

Just 53 patients remained late Friday in a facility that once had a 264-bed capacity. About 200 people lived at Foley as recently as March, when the state approved a closure plan.

Bellone is seeking further state approval, which he'd yet to receive by Friday, to formally notify patients in a letter that they can be moved to other nursing homes after June 30 if they haven't found their own accommodations by then.

Meanwhile, employees also continue to be cut. With four floors of beds condensed to one, a staff of 200 early this year is now at 141, officials said.

"I know employees were hoping for a last-minute reprieve, but that doesn't appear to be the case at this point," said Michael Finland, executive vice president of the Association of Municipal Employees, which represents Foley workers. "The county has demonstrated a serious intent for closure."

Each side in the debate over whether Suffolk should run a nursing home blames the other for the outcome.

"I'm not telling people to resist, because I know there's limited beds out there," said county Legis. Kate Browning (WF-Shirley), among the staunchest advocates for keeping Foley in public hands. "But this isn't fixing our budget hole. It's still going to cost us money to maintain an empty building."

Dogged by budget, mission

That five-story building, which opened in 1995 on the grounds of the old county infirmary, was named after the late Legis. John J. Foley. A Democrat from Blue Point, Foley resisted one of the first efforts to privatize long-term nursing care services in Suffolk in the early 1990s.

Former County Executive Patrick Halpin, a Democrat, led that effort after a panel he convened suggested in 1989 that Suffolk -- then also in a budget crisis -- yield nursing home operations to a nonprofit. But fierce union and lawmaker resistance derailed that plan.

Halpin's successor, Republican Robert Gaffney, also considered privatizing the county nursing home in the mid-1990s, but never formally proposed it.

The movement didn't intensify until 2008, when Levy, then a Democrat, began his second term. Levy's first sale proposals met the same resistance that Halpin did before him, and Bellone would afterward.

Public health advocates said that private operators would not provide the same quality of care, and that Foley was needed as a "place of last resort" for the most severely ill patients to go after being turned away elsewhere.

The majority of county legislators initially agreed, even rejecting a sale proposal in 2010.

But the state then began encouraging counties to sell their nursing homes, and Levy in 2011 won a hard-fought vote to sell Foley for $36 million.

The buyer backed out months later.

Bellone revives proposal

After Bellone took office last year and learned that Suffolk could face a multiyear budget hole of $530 million, he reached a deal last July to sell the facility for $23 million to private nursing home operators Israel and Samuel Sherman.

The legislature narrowly approved the sale, but two of the dissenters, Browning and Legis. John M. Kennedy Jr. (R-Nesconset), joined the union in a lawsuit to block the plan, saying Bellone didn't follow proper procedure in conducting the deal.

With the sale stalled early this spring, union leaders reached agreement with the Shermans to guarantee Foley staff their jobs and salaries for 18 months, in exchange for dropping the suit and allowing a lease.

But the employees overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, and Kennedy and Browning have continued to criticize Bellone for not trying to run the facility more efficiently, for not considering other partnerships with nonprofits, and for swiftly seeking closure.

"I do not embrace the actions they've taken, I don't think it's wise, and it does nothing to meet the public need," Kennedy said.

Patients' plans mixed

As the inevitability of closure increased, some patients and their families moved fast, while others vow to hold out.

Joan Beckenstein, of the hamlet of Brookhaven, moved her husband, Ken, a five-year Foley resident, to a veterans facility April 1, and said she's glad that she didn't wait in the hope that Foley would stay open.

"This time I saw what was happening and thought, 'This just doesn't seem right, I'm making my move,' " she said.

But Richard Smith, 62, a veteran who has lived at Foley since 2009, said he and other patients are being forced to consider subpar accommodations so Bellone could quickly close Foley.

Smith said the facility had been "deliberately torpedoed with poor management and fantasy math."

"They're moving people out of here like slabs of beef. It ain't right," he said, adding that he has yet to find a facility up to Foley's standards. "They're going to have to pry me out with a flat bar."