Diana plans for Valley View's close

GOSHEN – In his opening budget address today, Orange County Executive Ed Diana vowed to file a closing plan for the Valley View nursing home, after spending months urging legislators to sell the county facility to a private company. In his marathon speech, Diana also announced plans to stay in office the next five years. Citing rising costs and questionable revenues, Diana said he was left with no choice but to sell or close the nursing home, or risk ruining the county's financial health. “This weighs heavy on me. I don't sleep well at night. But I was elected to do both the easy and hard things,” said Diana, who last week said he did not want to close the nursing home. The 350-bed facility has been at the center of a months-long controversy over the efficient management of the home during Diana's most recent term in office. Diana and members of the management team in charge of the facility said that declining funds from patients along with high pay and benefits afforded to the unionized staff have caused skyrocketing costs at the nursing home. Unable to control its expenses as a publicly-run facility, Diana said earlier the nursing home should be privatized. The home's workers, organized under the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) negotiated a reduced pay increase, from a 5 percent yearly raise for the next three years, to a yearly increase of 4.5 percent over the same period, he said. Other public employees have agreed to freeze their wages, he said. “About 1 to 2 million in givebacks, are you kidding? It's not enough” he said of the concessions. A bipartisan committee of the Orange County Legislature investigated Diana's claims about the home's excesses, but instead found that managers of the home wasted millions of dollars by overspending, according the investigative report. While deficits grew by millions of dollars at the home, Valley View Administrator William Pascocello served as a trustee of an outside union that organizes private sector workers. Diana blasted the legislative investigation as a political witch hunt. “This committee was anything but unbiased,” Diana said. “They knew from the start where they wanted to go.” The committee requested that Diana testify, but the county executive refused to appear under oath, according to legislative report. Diana's entire proposed budget for the county is $715.9 million for 2013, an increase of 0.4 percent over last year's budget of $712.9 million. The executive slated roughly $40 million dollars of surplus to cover remaining costs, he said. In the next year, the county risks spending more for services than it reaps in the form of tax revenue, he said. Ninety percent of mandatory county spending goes to fund state and federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and pension benefit programs, he said. Diana said his speech will be posted online.