By Steve Wishnia

Fed up with chronic conditions of low pay, understaffing, and disrepair, workers at a for-profit nursing home in the Buffalo suburbs will go on strike for 24 hours on Wednesday, May 17.

Gary Colston, a member of 1199SEIU’s bargaining committee at the Comprehensive Rehabilitation and Nursing Center at Williamsville, lists a litany of grievances. Almost half the 34 workers make less than $15 an hour, barely above the $14.20 minimum wage for upstate New York, he told Work-Bites during a break in the contract talks. They used to have a pension, but the current owners, Comprehensive Healthcare Management Services (CHMS), cancelled it after acquiring the 142-bed facility from Catholic Health System in 2015. Understaffing is so bad that residents sometimes get served cold food. There’s only one washing machine and dryer for the 110 residents.

“We’re down to one cook,” says Colston, a certified nursing assistant who’s worked at Williamsville for more than 23 years. “We are also down to two housekeepers.”

Another issue, 1199SEIU says, is that management has proposed eliminating the contract’s successorship clause, which protects workers’ wages and benefits if a new owner acquires the facility.

“Things went down” after CHMS took over, says Colston. The elevator was out of service for three months. Important equipment such as the Hoyer machines used to lift residents was broken, and there was a shortage of the carts used to carry food, linens, and cleaning supplies — as well as a shortage of mop heads.

The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Care Compare ratings gave the Williamsville facility five stars in 2014, the last year Catholic Health ran it, four stars in 2015, and one star every year since then. New York State’s Nursing Home Quality index has listed it in the bottom 20% every year since 2016.

“It is clear the ownership sought, and has acted, to save money through cuts in staffing (both numbers and benefits),” the Buffalo-based Center for Elder Law and Justice said in a report released last December. “Whether the ownership is siphoning funds away from the facility, as has been alleged in [state Attorney General Letitia] James’ lawsuit against the Villages of Orleans, and in Sam Halper’s federal case, is definitely a question worth investigating.”

Halper, who owns 13.5% of Comprehensive at Williamsville, was indicted last August on federal health-care fraud charges. He is accused of falsifying records at two nursing homes in Pennsylvania.

Six of the seven owners of Williamsville are defendants in Attorney General James’ lawsuit against the owners of the Villages of Orleans nursing home in Albion, a small town about 55 miles northeast of Buffalo. Formerly run by Orleans County, it was sold in 2014.

The suit, filed by James’ office last November, alleges that between 2015 and 2021, the Orleans owners purloined $18.6 million in Medicare and Medicaid funds by cutting staff and engaging in what’s called related-party transactions, contracting out services to businesses they or their relatives own. They hired CHMS to handle administrative services such as accounting and payroll, and paid rent to Telegraph Realty, which had purchased the site of the facility in 2014.

“The Villages’ reprehensible history of insufficient staffing and low quality of care is directly traceable to the owners’ financial scheme,” James’ office alleged. “Residents were subject to repeated abuse and neglect as the most basic functions of care were abandoned. Residents were forced to sit in their own urine and feces for hours.”

The suit seeks to force the owners to return all funds fraudulently received, to pay for financial and health-care monitors, and to remove David Gast, Sam Halper, and Ephram Lahasky from their ownership and managerial roles.

Gast, Halper, and Lahasky each own one-third of CHMS. Gast owns 24.5% of Comprehensive at Williamsville, while Lahasky owns 19% and Halper 13.5%. The other Orleans defendants included Joshua Farkovits, who owns 19% of Williamsville; Debbie Korngut, with 11.5%, and Teresa Lichtschein, her mother-in-law, who has a 7.5% share.

Gast, according to the Center for Elder Law and Justice, owns part of at least 13 nursing homes in New York and more than 40 elsewhere. Lahasky has a piece of at least 60 and possibly several hundred.

In April, the Orleans defendants filed several motions to dismiss the suit. Ephram Lahasky argued that CHMS provided only management services, and that neither he nor Gast and Halper were the operators. He denied that “the facility improperly cut staff and reduced expenses,” saying that the application to the Department of Health “fully understood that the new operators might need to cut staff in order for the operation to become financially feasible.”

“We do a lot more than just our jobs,” says Gary Colston. The regular staff, including licensed practical nurses and certified nursing assistants, have been covering doing laundry, cleaning, housekeeping, maintenance, and working the front desk when staff is short. Management has been filling the gap by hiring temporary workers, especially on the evening and overnight shifts. But they often don’t show up, he says, and they get paid more than regular staff.

Most of the staff, Colston adds, have worked there for years, and the union’s goal is to get more permanent workers hired.

“We want people who care about our residents. If we get a pension and better pay, we’ll be able to get regular staff in here who can build relationships with our residents,” he says. “We’re fighting to get this nursing home back up to par, like it should be.”