Don't give up on nursing home sale

The proposal to sell Suffolk County's John J. Foley Skilled Nursing Facility in Yaphank, after many twists and turns and a marathon legislative meeting last month, now seems hopelessly stalled. The county has to find a way to resolve this knotty issue. It won't be easy.

County Executive Steve Levy has long wanted to sell it, to get immediate revenue and save long-term costs. But now, with state Medicaid reimbursements set to shrink, the nursing home operator who had signed a contract last year to buy it says he wants out of the deal. And he wants his $1.8-million deposit back. Levy has refused to return that money, but it's likely he will have a hard time forcing Kenneth Rozenberg, now an unwilling and unhappy buyer, to go ahead with the $36-million purchase.

Levy's other option -- far less desirable than sale -- is to close it. The legislature rejected the sale idea, and he couldn't legally make provision for it in the budget. So he proposed to close it, and the 2011 budget only provided funding for Foley through March 31. But now there's a court injunction preventing closure. So, while Levy figures out what to do next, he and the legislature must agree on funding the facility for the rest of the year.

Then, there's the new four-year contract with the Association of Municipal Employees, representing 6,500 county employees, including workers at Foley. Levy agreed to the contract as part of the Foley deal, and the union ratified it. Now the legislature must approve it, and the county must pay for this year's 2 percent increase.

If Levy can't get Rozenberg to complete the purchase, he'll have to start looking for another buyer. This time, as he structures the selection process, he needs to address questions that the county comptroller has raised about the one that ended up choosing Rozenberg.

At the request of legislators, including Presiding Officer William Lindsay (D-Holbrook), Suffolk Comptroller Joseph Sawicki looked into the request-for-proposal process that led to Rozenberg. To boil down Sawicki's memo: He found the process legal but smelly. Levy's staff argues that the selection was completely open and Sawicki's findings were politically motivated. But his memo describes compensation for a consulting firm that would include a hefty commission, and Sawicki questions that approach.

So Levy may need to start from scratch, with another public process. This time, given the county's budget woes, if he needs a consultant's help to sort out the responses, he should just pay by the hour. He should not agree to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions on top of the hourly rates, as he is set to do if the Rozenberg purchase goes through.

Levy came close to getting the county out of the nursing home business, a step this page supports. But now it's far more complex. And the state reimbursement cuts may lower the final price. So what's next?

Closing the home is too harsh; selling it may be too hard. But Levy has to keep trying. Before he leaves office on Dec. 31, his goal should be to complete the sale, reap the revenue, save the county the annual cost of operation in the future, and make sensible arrangements to protect the 200-plus current patients. That might be his most daunting challenge, but he has no choice except to embrace it and get it done.