New Haven Independent

The 226-bed, 93-year-old nursing home had a deal earlier this year to sell its Davenport Avenue property to Amistad. The celebrated K-8 charter school hopes to build a a new four-acre $6-$8 million campus there, including building an athletic field and a gym and converting the private patient rooms into educational facilities.

But first the Jewish Home needed a state law passed giving it permission to move the beds — some 50 of which they hope to build in a new suburban facility, probably in Woodbridge. The bill failed to pass during this legislative session. It was stalled first by missteps with local politicians who wished they’d been consulted earlier, then by negotiations over preserving urban nursing beds and union jobs.

The bill’s failure has led Amistad to explore other possible sites, and the Jewish Home revisiting its options.

However, it turns out the deal might not be dead for this session, after all. At least not according to State Sen. Jonathan Harris. Harris co-chairs the legislature’s Human Services Committee, where the Jewish Home’s proposed law died.

Harris said Monday that at the time he had hoped to attach the necessary legal language to an existing bill, the parties to negotiations about the Jewish Home — the Home’s directors, the state’s social services department, District 1199 of the SEIU, and the association of nursing-home operators — hadn’t reached agreement on crucial issues. Now the crucial issues have been resolved, Harris said. So he hopes to make the enabling law part of so-called “Implementer” legislation the legislature will take up once it passes a new state budget. These are the laws that fill out the details of how money in the budget will be actually spent.

The legislature is currently in special session. Harris predicted that if a budget is passed by the end of this week, the implementer bills will be taken up next week.

“That is where would put this fix,” he said. “It’s still alive.”

New Haven elected officials as well as District 1199 were concerned about the loss of nursing-home beds in the city of New Haven, 1199 spokeswoman Deborah Chernoff said. Since the summer of 1996, New Haven has lost 446 beds, 240 of them at the former Atrium Plaza. The Home agreed to maintain the number of beds the same in the city, even as it builds new ones in Woodbridge, partly by transferring the licenses for as many as 75 beds to the Hospital of St. Raphael.

Harris said the Home also promised to keep all the Home’s 200 unionized employees (like custodian Joy McNeil, pictured on the facility’s third floor with Vinette Wilson), even if that means transferring (and paying to transport) them to Woodbridge. Chernoff said Monday that the Home originally made that promise orally but has failed to put it in writing. “That’s obviously a problem for us,” she said. “We’re not there yet. We’re moving in the right direction.”

Meanwhile, barring a last-minute resuscitation at the state legislature, “We’re trying to figure out” the next move, said Home board chairman Louis Goldberg. “We’re looking at at a number of different options… We’re sad that the legislature did not pass the bill.”

“We’re just waiting to see how it plays itself out,” said Amistad founder Dacia Toll. “We’re still looking high and low for other properties. We think the jewish Home would make a wonderful location. W would love to be in the Hill.” But because of the uncertainty, she said, Amistad has also been looking at other locations the past few months.

The deal reflects the new ways society is looking at how to take care of the elderly.

The Jewish Home for the Aged was formed in 1914 by a group of women known as the Sister of Zion. Its Davenport Avenue building was then in the heart of the Jewish community. The Home itself earned a reputation for quality care (of a broad community, not just Jews) as well as for maintaining a unionizing workforce.

Jews have long since left the Hill for neighborhoods and towns largely to the west. While the Home serves a broad population, the Davenort Avenue location has proved problematic for families of the Jewish patients at the core of its mission, some of whose families are reluctant to travel into the Hill.

Meanwhile, newer ideas have developed about the best ways of caring for the elderly. The board wants to move the Home to the campus of Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Woodbridge, but in a new form — as a series of homey 10-bedroom stand-alone “greenhouses” rather than a single large institution.

The plans aren’t firm yet. But the basic idea is to build five new 3,500-square-foot stand-alone homes on undeveloped land. Each home would have 10 private bedrooms, a shared kitchen, and a family room. The licensed nurses and aides wouldn’t wear uniforms; they’d be “dressed as regular people,” Goldberg said in an interview earlier this year.

The idea is to feel like “you’re walking into a house,” not an institution, he said. “Residents,” not “patients.” The JCC and all its services for the elderly would be right next door. The Home would also boost outpatient services for the elderly to help infirm older people stay in their own homes longer rather than move into a nursing home.

Even if the enabling law passes in the next week or two, another issue will remain to be settled, according to Sen. Harris. The Home would be able to build the new dwellings under a category known as “Continuing Care Retirement Community.” That would limit which patients would qualify to move in there after a period of five years, Harris said. Settling that issue will require “a larger discussion about [the state’s] moratorium [on nursing beds] and what do about it,” Harris said. “That’s for another day.”