GETZVILLE, N.Y. (WKBW) — LaCearne Toni Banks is an environmental service worker at Weinberg Campus, in Getzville.
The role she loves so much has kept her coming back for the last 14 years.
"When I first came here, it was hard to get in here. You had to wait a while. The waiting list was so long and they vetted you so well. This was a great place," LaCearne Toni Banks said.
Banks is also a union delegate.
She was accompanied by 1199 United Healthcare Workers East Organizer Darlene Gates during our interview Friday, at the campus.
Gates spoke with my colleague Kristen Mirand on Thursday. The full story can be found here.
The two are part of the union and hope to push for new leadership after they said the current one is partially to blame for the current financial situation.
"Not only now are they dealing with the uncertainties of pay increases and receiving their paychecks, nor have they received the benefits from the bargaining agreement that we reached," 1199 United Healthcare Workers East Organizer Darlene Gates said.
Banks said she and her colleagues were worried that bounced checks would happen again this week.
"This week, Friday came, and nobody had anything pending in their accounts. People who got paid by debit card or if your money was electronically deposited, nothing. Now, everybody is like, why should we have to work for free," Banks said.
I took questions to Chris Koenig, who is the president of Lineage Care Group, which is an alliance of nursing homes.
Weinburg is one of them.
I asked Koenig to break down the consolidation of beds. There are 180 beds at Weinberg.
Lineage Care Group President Christopher Koenig said, "Yeah, so there's 180 total beds on the operating certificate. So, they have heating and cooling units for each room called PTACs. The difficulty with that is when they go down, they are a couple of thousand dollars to replace. This means, that the room is non-operational because they don't have the funds to replace those now. So, the idea was then to pull the units that work and consolidate them to specific floors. That way, we have the staff on similar floors, rather than have them run all over the building between multiple floors."
I also asked about how the union wants a transition of power.
"I think what they are referring to is the receivership. So, that's the transition of ownership. Being a nonprofit, there's not actually owners. We have boards. So, there's multiple boards that we have between Niagara, Wheatfield, Scoffield, Lineage. So what it would do with the receivership is we would tell the state, hey look. Our board of directors is going to take over from the Weinberg Board. We're going to oversee the operations from here. So, leadership would transition with the funds that would come in."
I did ask Koenig about what happens next and if he anticipates any change before the end of the year.
He said at this point, it is in the hands of state lawmakers.
I also reached out to the President and Chief Executive Officer at Weinberg Campus Robert Meyer for comment Friday evening and have not heard back.
