NYS takeover of private provider brings clients, jobs full circle
By SHERRY HALBROOK
Tom Grace remembers when 59 clients moved out of West Seneca Developmental Center near Buffalo and into the hands of a private agency. Now, that agency’s clients are back in state care and they are bringing their staff with them.
“All
59 of the original clients at the Geneva B. Scruggs
Intermediate Care Facility came from West Seneca
Developmental Center,” Grace says. “That was
back about 1985, and it was the single largest exodus of
clients West Seneca ever had.”A lot has happened since that exodus, and history has come full circle.
Grace is president of PEF Division 167 at West Seneca, which is now called Western New York Developmental Disabilities Services Office, where he is a social worker.
On May 6, 2000, Western NY DDSO took over operation of the Scruggs facility and changed its name to the “Kensington ICF.” The employees automatically became state employees, but without civil-service status or protections. After they have worked for the state for one year, state law calls for them to be brought into comparable titles in state service without examination.
Grace and PEF Executive Board Member Rich Ensminger, a developmental specialist at Western NY DDSO, say they expect approximately 13 of these employees to become PEF members in May.
Many of the employees were represented by the Civil Service Employees Association when they worked for the Scruggs organization, which also operated a community health care center next to the ICF.
The PEF leaders said they hope to meet with the new members in May to welcome them to PEF.
“The
change will probably mean a substantial pay raise for
some of them,” Ensminger says.Reversals of fortune and policy have marked this circular episode from its beginnings, they say.
In fact, things seemed to be backwards right from the start.
State policy calls for moving clients out of large institutions and back into homes in their communities whenever possible.
So, the clients were sent from the state center to the smaller, private center. It sounds right, but really was backward, according to Grace.
The name “West Seneca Developmental Center” may conjure up images of a big, impersonal institution, but it is made up of ranch-style buildings with small, client units, scattered over a pleasant campus.
The clients moved out of these units and into the Scruggs ICF, situated in an old six-story wing of Erie County Medical Center, which is in an economically depressed area of Buffalo. On paper, it may have made sense, but you didn’t have to look twice at the actual situation to know it was wrong, Grace says.
The Scruggs Community Health Care Center had opened in 1979, followed later by the ICF, and both were attempts to bring services, jobs and vitality to the troubled Buffalo neighborhood.
But both the health center and the ICF developed problems with accreditation, finances, and staffing. Finally, last year, the state took over the ICF in May and the health center in November.
The return of these clients to state care and the staff to state service illustrates what PEF has been preaching for years, say Ensminger and Grace: that no one provides public services better than public employees.
“Accountability and quality control are the hallmarks of state service,” Grace says. “It’s a good thing we still have the state center and the DDSO here to bring this situation under control.
“The clients will have good, dependable state care,” he adds. “The staff members will have livable wages and good contractual and civil-service protections. And our PEF division is regaining some of the membership it lost over the years. It’s a win all around.”
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