The effort to save the teetering Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn – a major campaign goal of Mayor de Blasio’s – appeared to collapse Tuesday.
De Blasio, state officials and two powerful healthcare unions all but acknowledged that the winning bidder for the site, a group called Brooklyn Health Partners, has little ability to follow through on its pledge to maintain a hospital there.
“As we learn more, there are some real concerns being raised about the bid,” de Blasio spokesman Phil Walzak said.
A state source was more blunt, saying that after weeks of negotiations, the Brooklyn Health Partners proposal was looking like “fantasyland.”
“There’s no way they’re going to deliver on anything close to it….It would be almost irresponsible to move forward with this company,” the source said.
The State University of New York, which owns the money-losing hospital, is expected to disqualify BHP and begin talks with the No. 2 bidder, developer Don Peebles, the source said.
It’s unclear when the plug will be pulled on Brooklyn Health Partners, but “the clock is ticking,” the source added. SUNY is set to give up control of LICH on May 22.
A spokeswoman for Brooklyn Health Partners insisted the project would go forward. “On May 5, BHP will make a $25 million non-refundable payment and show it has the financial means to complete the entire project. We would hope that the mayor and other stakeholders would judge BHP, not on unsubstantiated rumors, but on its performance,” she said.
SUNY has long wanted to close the hospital, but during last year’s mayoral race, de Blasio was arrested protesting the shutdown.
However, the plan by the No. 2 bidder, Peebles, calls for limited health-care services on the site, not the full-fledged hospital that many in the community want.
“Our first, and only, responsibility is the preservation of quality, uninterrupted health care services at the LICH site,” Walzak said.
If BHP’s hospital plan falls through, “then the community, SUNY and other stakeholders must look elsewhere for the best proposal.”
The healthcare workers union SEIU/1199 and the state Nurses Association complained Tuesday that BHP had not detailed how it would keep the hospital open.
“They have no apparent plan for continuity of care and they have refused to engage productively,” the unions said.
And City Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) alleged that BHP has shown a “total lack of information and readiness.” on the part of BHP.
Brooklyn Health Partners was declared the winning bidder for LICH over nine others in part because the process favored proposals that included plans for a full-scale hospital.
“They keep saying: ‘trust us, trust us.’ But there’s no track record and we sit in meetings with these guys and keep changing stories and proposals and it keeps getting further and further away from what they said they were going to do,” the state source said of BHP.
BHP officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
With Annie Karni
