Nursing Home News

Excerpt from the N-G today:

Tom Kacich: County board looking line by line for budget fix

Champaign County Board members who want to both keep the county nursing home under public control and avoid layoffs in other departments are getting deeply immersed in the county budget in advance of a critical meeting.

The choices are not easy.

"I've been in meetings for more than five hours over the last few weeks and I haven't even been at all of the meetings," said Champaign Democrat Stephanie Fortado, appointed to the county board in June and already the deputy chair of the finance committee. "We're just going through the budget line by line. If you come up with a scenario, we've probably already talked about it."

County board Democrats, who last month voted against putting the money-losing nursing home up for sale, have to find an estimated $1.4 million of budget cuts or new revenue to balance the county's spending plan for the year beginning Jan. 1.

Fortado's goal, she said, is to "make sure the nursing home stays public, but I also want to make sure that we do everything in our power to make sure that the cuts don't hurt personnel.

"There are no easy answers. When the whole board comes together (at a committee of the whole meeting) is when we're going to have those conversations. But we haven't found the one silver bullet."