Portage Manor residents and their loved ones who advocate for them were sad and angry Tuesday to hear St. Joseph County commissioners announce they’ll stick with their initial decision to close the home.
They’re also stressed and uncertain about the future.
Commissioners in February voted to close the county-owned home for people who are disabled with low incomes. They cited its negative cash balances in recent years and its need for substantial building upgrades.
When their vote sparked an outcry from the community, commissioners Carl Baxmeyer and Derek Dieter voted to delay the closure for 60 days and they appointed a task force to explore ways to keep it open. The task force recommended the county retain ownership but contract with a private entity to operate it.
Granger physician Dr. Sylvana Atallah was the only one to step forward with an offer to operate Portage Manor, and she formed a nonprofit she called “A Home for Everyone Inc.”
To make it work, Atallah told commissioners she would need the $2.7 million in American Rescue Plan money that they had set aside for the upgrades. She also said the state wouldn’t grant her a license to run Portage Manor unless she could show documentation of such an operating agreement with the county.
Commissioners hired consultant Rick Stiffney to evaluate Atallah’s plan. He found it lacked enough detail.
That wasn’t a big surprise to Portage Township Trustee Jason Critchlow, who co-chaired the task force with County Council Member Mark Catanzarite. But Critchlow says that rather than supporting commissioners, Stiffney’s report on Atallah’s proposal found that it could have worked if commissioners had funded Portage Manor’s needed upgrades over the past couple of years.
“This consultant’s report is vindicating in many ways because it specifically says in here that this ‘might have been possible had the work and feasibility been carefully done 12 to 18 months ago,” Critchlow says. “’However these are complicated to design and negotiate.’ So the idea that anyone in 60 days could put together a comprehensive plan seems unreasonable, even to this expert that the county commissioners hired to review these proposals.”
People who have family members living in Portage Manor repeatedly told commissioners that they would hate to move from the home, but if they have to, they at least want to stay together. Many view each other, and Portage Manor staff, as family.
Baxmeyer and Dieter said they might have an option for “almost all” of Portage Manor’s 85 residents to move to another facility together, but they declined to elaborate because negotiations are ongoing. But Laura McLellan, whose brother Edward has lived in Portage Manor for 18 Years, said there is only one other facility in the county that accepts the specific type of state funding that most Portage Manor residents receive. But the other facility, which provides assisted living, isn’t accepting new residents.
McLellan told Commissioner Derek Dieter that she met him a couple years ago at a Portage Manor summer party, and he told her then how much he cares about Portage Manor’s residents.
“You said you cared about Portage Manor and its residents, and I want you to know how betrayed I feel by your behavior since then,” McLellan said.
Other Portage Manor residents’ family members also voiced anger at commissioners at their meeting Tuesday. They included Trish Becker, whose 63-year-old sister, Victoria Walz, has schizophrenia and has lived at Portage Manor since the 1980s.
Becker said she won’t put her sister in a nursing home because it likely will lack expertise in mental health care.
Baxmeyer and Dieter did not say when Portage Manor will close. But Becker worries about the fate of her sister and others.
“These people are on the streets most of the time,” Becker said. “These are a lot of the people that we see homeless. Do we need another 100 homeless people in St. Joe County? They’re sick. They need help. These are the little ones in our community that we all have an obligation to take care of.”
Baxmeyer said commissioners will pass their recommendation to close Portage Manor on to the county council at its next meeting June 13.
