Full Board
We had a petition in 2020 with 1200 signatures to save to ACC. Sheila Lashinsky collected another 200 signatures from seniors a few years ago, and I did another petition in 2025 which I sent to the DOH with 700 signatures. I still have it if you want to see it. Thousands of residents of this county have signed their names to say that they want Sullivan County to support our county owned nursing home, the Adult Care Center at Sunset Lake, but apparently that isn’t enough to convince you that your constituents do not want you to close the facility. We’re so tired of telling you. Now, you want to rush to vote again to close the ACC. The numbers you refer to are all from Mr. Potosek, who is the person most interested in closing the facility, although running it is part of his job, and you’re still taking advice from the County Attorney, although previous counsel from him is what has put you in this mess. You should get a real assessment from an uninterested party. I’ve been asking you for years to appoint a committee to develop a transition plan to take the ACC back to it’s previous 5 star status. There’s no need to rush.
Your illegal closure has caused a lot of misery for the employees, the residents and their families. I don’t think that you could have anticipated that it would be operationalized in such an unnecessarily brutal way. For that, you need to acknowledge the combined efforts of the County Manager, his deputy, the Administrator, his deputy, and the Director of Nursing. This legislature needs to evaluate their job performances here, after the callous way that they’ve treated the ACC residents, cajoling and threatening them into leaving their homes, and how they’ve manipulated the employees into voluntarily leaving their jobs, even while they held pink slips. They’ve violated the injunction to stop the closure repeatedly. We, the taxpayers, are paying for these county employees to do wrongful and illegal acts. Tell me, who benefits from this? Mr. Potosek doesn’t want to run a nursing home that your constituents want to keep. Where do your loyalties lie?
You still have a chance to turn this around. Please listen to your constituents and take another vote. Let’s seriously look at how Valley View is able to make millions of dollars in Orange County. Don’t rush your decisions. It’s not going to be that easy to clean this up. Don’t make the same mistake the previous legislature did.