County looking
for a loophole

By DAVID HULSE

MONTICELLO — County officials say they have inherited the costs for services as well as the obligation for investigating and prosecuting the crimes committed by newly released mental patients who are being warehoused in Sullivan by New York City hospitals.

They say the hospitals’ knowing conspirators are the operators of private, sometimes poorly maintained, adult care facilities. Some of these facilities are licensed by the state and some are unlicensed. Their owners solicit, sometimes physically collect newly-released patients from the hospitals and pocket their monthly government subsidy checks while providing little or no care.

The result of this human importation has led to violent crime, like this year’s murder in Liberty of a 77-year-old blind woman by a housemate at one such facility and last year’s fire extinguisher bludgeoning death of a Community General Hospital (CGH) patient by a Monticello Manor resident.

Considering the results of last month’s Family Services Division/County Attorney’s office investigation of the county’s alternatives for keeping tabs on these adult homes, family service committee chairwoman Leni Binder (D-7) says Sullivan will have to be enterprising to effect any change.

Living conditions at the homes, especially the unlicensed ones, can be dangerous in themselves. Legislator Robert Kunis last month described conditions those facilities as “unimaginably bad.”

And the state’s oversight of licensed homes has done little to make them much better, Binder says. State oversight “is just so sloppy…That’s the best thing I can say,” Binder says.

Binder says the county’s particular problem is not seen elsewhere, since many of those who are housed here form homeless populations in the cities. Sullivan gets them because the homes are here. Initially set up to house senior citizens in shared low-cost apartment settings, the homes eventually replaced lost senior populations with mental health patients saying Medicaid rent payments for the seniors were inadequate.

Binder says that while investigations of code violations by town officers might be fruitful, there is no legal way to institute a probe without a police or private complaint. Many clients in these homes receive other county health and social services, but not lodging. Social services agents are said to be wary of making complaints about the residences for fear of being barred admission in future

A county inspector checks prospective residences for foster care and other county managed lodging programs, but the county can’t enforce town and village codes.

Admittedly perplexed by the problem, Binder suggested something akin to door checks for those social services clients. “My way would be to knock on the door and ask if he or she lives there. Admittedly, it’s the ‘backdoor’ in,” she said.

Even if that works, “we pay for another inspection. It becomes a county expense and these are not county people,” she says.

Binder says the problem must be taken on at the source and supports a county lawsuit against the hospitals themselves. “The issue becomes: are the releases legitimate. If [the hospitals] know these patients need continuing medication and they release them to homes who won’t monitor them or disregard them altogether….They’re not providing homes, they’re just out to get these peoples’ Social Security Insurance checks,” Binder said.

A lawsuit may not stop the practice but it might give the hospital community pause. “We want to annoy them enough to make them think twice,” she said.

In fact, it could prompt a different situation altogether. The same hospitals themselves could set up satellite operations in Sullivan, she said. “We could be trading a headache for an upset stomach, if they come here,” she said adding, “but if they do come here, at least we’ll be able to inspect them.”