Issue Position: Quality of Life

Issue Position

On July 10, 2013, the administration of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a plan to shut down inpatient services at and diminish the overall role of the Elmira Psychiatric Center (Elmira PC) beginning in 2014.

A little over two weeks later, on July 26, 2013, a second Cuomo administration announcement revealed the administration's intention to close the Monterey Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in Schuyler County, also in 2014.

These two actions alone go a long way toward crystallizing the fundamentally important work facing so many communities across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes in the ongoing challenge to promote, protect and strengthen our locally based facilities and institutions.

The efforts to convince the Cuomo administration to reverse these decisions were difficult and demanded rallying local community support and action to make our case for maintaining each of these facilities.

Point one: cost effectiveness. We rightfully kept on highlighting the cost-effectiveness of the Elmira PC and Monterey Shock.

The Elmira PC was the state's highest-rated facility in key areas including cost-efficiency, length of inpatient stay and rate of readmission. The bottom line was that thanks to the Elmira PC it was costing the state just $3.65 million to effectively serve an 11-county region.

Turning our attention to Monterey, we knew that shock facilities had saved the state millions of dollars. Additionally, the participation of Monterey inmate work crews in numerous community service and enhancement projects across a four-county region here at home during the six years prior to 2013 alone saved local communities and taxpayers upwards of $6 million!

So we argued that the Cuomo administration could go ahead and keep on billing these proposed closures as fiscally necessary for New York in the long run, but it was important that we continue to let Governor Cuomo know that they were not making any fiscal common sense at all. It appeared hard, if not impossible to improve upon the Elmira PC's record of fiscal responsibility. The same held true for Monterey.

In the end, this fight went well beyond dollars and cents. It cut to the core of the quality of New York State's systems of mental health and correctional services.

Point two, then, was programmatic quality. We clearly made the case that the Elmira PC has been and remains an irreplaceable lifeline for thousands upon thousands of patients and their families throughout the Southern Tier, Finger Lakes and western New York. And we easily demonstrated that the staff of Monterey, past and present, turned around numerous lives that were once at a dead-end but that, as a result of Monterey, are now productive and successful.

We ultimately won the battle to save the Elmira PC but, regrettably to this day, the Cuomo administration ignored the strong case we made to keep Monterey open.

Each case goes to show that we must constantly remain on guard against these efforts by the Albany bureaucracy to impact our communities in these ways.

It's why we continue to speak out for and stand behind our correctional officers regionally and statewide.

It's why I was pleased to note some recently important state-federal support for the Academy of Fire Sciences in Montour Falls. Over the past few years, we've been concerned about and raised questions over the Cuomo administration's future plans for the Academy.

The overriding point is that our communities must be ready, at a moment's notice, to fight back and rally support for community institutions, programs or services being put at risk by the Albany bureaucracy. That's what we've done.

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