County Board Special Meeting 5/9

There was a Special Meeting of the Champaign County Board where the potential purchasers of the Nursing Home presented their information, their history and current work with other properties and nursing homes (agenda here and video here). Here's an excerpt from the News-Gazette summary:

Prospective buyers share vision for nursing home with county board
Executives from the two companies interested in buying the financially challenged Champaign County Nursing Home offered their visions for the future of the facility and its employees Wednesday at a special meeting of the county board where attendees also heard about the transition to private ownership from the administrator of a Nebraska home that was sold by its county board in 2009.

Earlier this year, Extended Care Clinical LLC and Altitude Health Services Inc., both headquartered in Evanston, offered the only proposal to buy the nursing home. Their bid was for $11 million, the minimum amount set by the board.

William "Avi" Rothner, Altitude Health Services' founder and president, told board members he wasn't there to sway any votes.

"People for the sale are going to be for the sale, and people who are against the sale will be against the sale," Rothner said. "My goal is not to lay people off. My goal is to grow."

More at the full article here. That last statement seemed to hold true during the question and answer session, which takes up almost all of the nearly two and a half hours with the bidders present (video here). There were assurances of a smooth transition for patients and family and retaining workers that wanted to stay and willing to adapt to the new system.The reality of working out the transition may take about a year to get everything settled, but it won't be chaos in between. Family and residents ideally won't be impacted by the process beyond added amenities and other planned positive improvements.

The civilian members of the RFP committee on the sale (that dealt with ensuring the bid met the requirements and make recommendations to the full board) asked questions around the 2:14 minute mark. The first question in particular explained his minimum bid and all of the factors that led them to believe that this was a safe bid. This was apparently due to the home's troubles and the low potential for other bids by their estimation. That estimation relied on factors like all of the public bad news about the facility, the complicated required process, Illinois market leaning against new buyers, etc. In the event there were multiple minimum bids, their experience with such situation is the seller decides to have a further bidding process/competition afterward.

The buyers left around the 2:27 mark and Chairman Weibel called a three minute recess before moving on to the rest of the agenda. The Deputy County Administrator of Finance, Tami Ogden, then went over the various numbers of the potential sale and where that money would go given the bonds, debt service, relief, etc. This is explained starting around the 2:28 minute mark here.

Public Participation started around the 2:40 minute mark. Three speakers remained to the end. The second speaker pointed out an example of problems with a home the company owns elsewhere and the dependence on the semantics of owning versus operating he believed was merely to avoid responsibility. The final speaker pointed out a recent commentary also highlighted here: Defense of Nursing Home Management.

The earliest that this could be put up to a vote, as far as I understand the situation and according to other recent reporting, is at the May 24th County Board meeting where it may still be tentatively scheduled for a vote. More at the recent post on the vote count from a couple weeks ago here.