LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs will close the Little Rock Veterans Home in early November, giving the 15 residents who have not yet found a new nursing home or assisted-living facility about two months to do so.
The home had 70 residents in June when Cissy Rucker, director of the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs, announced that the troubled facility would close after all residents hadmoved to new Veterans Administration-approved nursing homes of their choosing. Since then, social workers with the state department and the federal VA have worked with residents to find new homes.
“We had two move out today,” Rucker said Monday. “We’re hoping by getting the closing date settled, we can get people to make decisions, the best decisions for them.”
She said the 15 residents who haven’t made arrangements to move will do so by early November.
“Some were holding on, not making arrangements in hopes it wouldn’t close,” she said. “We’re confident we’re going to be able to relocate everybody to a new location.”
Shutting the home’s doors also means all 68 employees will lose their jobs.
On Sept. 17, the state Reduction in Force plan will activate for the workers, placing their names and skills into a database for distribution to all human resource offices in state agencies.
The policy allows state agencies to hire state employees who are losing their jobs because of cutbackswithout having to go through the extensive state hiring process.
“Once you’ve been reduced in force, an agency can hire you without going through the state application process. ... All the agency has to do is call and set up an interview. They can hire them on the spot,” said Don Lukas, a manager at the state Office of Personnel Management.
Rucker said two job fairs have been set up for the home’s employees next week as well.
“Fortunately, the jobs we have at the home are in demand,” Rucker said. “We’re hoping that we can take some of the positions and move them to Fayetteville [Veterans Home] and keep as many as possible employed.”
The employees include housekeeping and maintenance staff, dietitians, certified nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses and registerednurses.
Rucker said she understands the reluctance of some of the remaining residents to move.
“Change is hard,” she said. “When you’re elderly and this is all you’ve known, it’s tough. I wish we didn’t have to close it, either.”
The closure of the Little Rock Veterans Home met some opposition when it was first announced, within weeks of Rucker’s appointment as head of the Veterans Department.
Gov. Mike Beebe appointed Rucker to head the department in May, about one week after he asked former Director Dave Fletcher to retire amid discoveries of mismanagement of the home and that about $600,000 in fees had been collected illegally from the home’s most disabled residents since 2009.
A change in federal law in 2009 increased the monthly rate the VA pays state veterans homes for the care of the nation’s most disabled veterans and prohibits states from collecting out-of-pocket fees for their care.
The state Department of Veterans Affairs under Fletcher discontinued the collection of the $1,800 monthly fee from eligible residents in the Fayetteville Veterans Home immediately after the law changed. But Fletcher allowed the fee collection to continue at the Little Rock Home, which has struggled financially for years.
In April, Fletcher fired Janet Levine as Little Rock’s home administrator, blaming her for the collection of those illegal fees.
Two weeks ago, the Arkansas State Employee Grievance Panel overturned her firing and upheld her appeal. The Aug. 25 report on the hearing from the Department of Finance and Administration stated that there was no evidence of an attempt to defraud the state or be dishonest.
“While the record is sufficient to show that [Levine] did not perform well as Administrator,” the report states, “the cause of the poor performance could be correlated to the ignorance and lack of leadership of the Director [Fletcher] and Deputy Director [Lawrence Pickard].”
Rucker fired Pickard as deputy in her first week on the job.
The panel ordered that Levine be reinstated as administrator of the Little Rock Veterans Home “with back pay and all benefits to which she may be entitled.”
Rucker has until today to appeal that decision.
“That decision has not been made,” she said Monday afternoon.
It would be difficult to reinstate Levine as administrator, as Rucker hired a new administrator five weeks ago. Like the home’s other employees, he will be out of a job in two months as well.
When asked whether the decision to set a closing date on the home was related to the panel’s findings, Rucker said simply, “No. The home should have been closed just because of the physical structure of it.”
An inspection of the home by the state’s building services arm last month revealed chronic structural problems that were not revealed byFletcher or his staff. The inspectors estimated it would take $10 million just to fix collapsed sewer lines that are backing up into the kitchen and bring the wiring, heating and cooling and other systems up to meet state codes.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/11/2012