With Vote On New Our Island Home Funding, Nantucket Must Decide What Kind Of Community It Really Is

To the editor: What’s done is done. Voters will be voting on a roughly $100 million bill at Town Meeting for a new skilled nursing home for Nantucket. It would be easy to focus on a lump sum like $100 million but it would be far better, in my mind, if voters had an itemized statement. This is supposed to be an “all-inclusive” estimate covering furniture, fixtures, and medical equipment. How much is just for the building itself and how much is for the contents? That may make the amount far more palatable than if it were only building cost.

Was the $54 million for the 2017 plan all-inclusive or was that just for the building itself?

Skilled nursing homes cannot be furnished like private homes or even assisted living. There are rules and regulations for the interior of a skilled nursing home. It is a medical facility for persons with physical and cognitive disability; they must be accommodated in various ways. One small example would be corridors wide enough to handle wheelchairs as well as doorways large enough.

They must have special beds. When my mother was in Sherburne assisted living, I bought a hospital bed for her. That was not required, obviously, but I wanted her to have the furniture that matched her level of disability.

Also included in the $100 million is housing for Sherburne staff. How much does that cost in total? I frankly cannot remember the original funding for Sherburne Commons, itself, but I ask now how much of that was town expenditure, if any? I do remember the forgiveness of a $1 million loan from the town to Sherburne.

Nantucket has reached a stage where many of its grand houses—those with eight bedrooms and ten or more bathrooms—stand empty most of the year. Yes, this is private funding but it is also a waste, especially when so many in the workforce struggle to find even minimal housing.

When houses sell for $20 and $30 million, $100 million does not seem so enormous anymore, especially for a building that runs 24/7 all days of the year. To provide another perspective, a 10,000-square-foot house costing $30 million is, on a square footage basis, much more expensive than a 50,000-square-foot facility costing $100 million. The new building will have 45 beds, but there will be turnover of residents, and those on Medicare, after qualified hospital stays, will have a relatively short time at the nursing home as they rehabilitate.

Communities throughout the United States struggle now because there are not enough nursing home beds for the need. Hospital patients who appropriately need long-term skilled nursing home care languish in hospitals because there are no skilled nursing home beds to transfer them to.

It should come as no surprise to many in Nantucket, especially those who were born and raised on the island, that the community is frayed. Marianne Stanton has written extensively about how many community institutions Nantucket has lost. Our Island Home is quintessentially a community institution serving Nantucket families through the decades. The residents of OIH are not simply individuals but members of families. These families simply are unable to care for the residents, themselves, even though they often have tried. I know because there was no way that I could have taken care of my mother once she was blind with hip dysplasia. Every day my mother was alive, I was deeply grateful to OIH sta for providing the care that I could not.

So voters at Town Meeting must ask themselves, as they vote on whether to pay $100 million for a skilled nursing home, whether Nantucket is a tourist town catering to the needs of those visiting and those who are rich, or is it a community with a distinctive and distinguished history characterized by its devotion to family and family members in need.

Maureen Searle