Bailing Out Valley View

Should the taxpayers support Valley View Home financially, or no? There have been some passionate and definitive statements regarding the topic.

I was employed at Valley View Home for 27 years. I can assure you that this “fool” has first-hand knowledge of what happened there in recent years. I didn’t have to rely on what others told me because I was there. I experienced it.

I can also assure you that none of the information that was fed to me came from any member of the board. They were noticeably absent in my final years of employment. That is why I’m surprised at the amount of information Mr. Wiltfong has to share with the community. It seems easy to accuse people of lobbing cheap shots at the Valley View board members when you are receiving information from your safe space, I guess.

The problem is, you can bring in any entity or administrator you want, but if the overall work environment of the facility doesn’t respect, trust and acknowledge its employees, things will continue to fail. And, as Mr. Cassel said in his recent letter to the Courier, there needs to be an assurance that the organization is properly structured.

Mr. Wiltfong, you made it very clear that a board of directors is not in place to manage an entity, but they are responsible for overseeing and safeguarding management. Despite your passionate defense of the board of directors, I think they failed.

When you talk about what is or isn’t legal in the management of an entity, you may just be appalled at how some careers were brought to an end under the management of HMS. Unfortunately, it is difficult to retain legal counsel when you’re unemployed.

The good, smart people that you refer to on the board are the same people that so easily allowed the dismissal of many qualified, knowledgeable, experienced staff – effectively collapsing the entire foundation that Valley View Home was functioning on. When you say that FMDH brought in “key people in the field of elderly patient care,” my response is: those key people were already employed there. Unfortunately, with the hiring of new administration and contracting with HMS, those key employees were no longer valued.

The facility that maybe isn’t functioning so well right now could use a little help to get back on its feet. Does that onus fall on Valley County taxpayers? Maybe. I understand why people are resistant to bailing out Valley View Home, but for those that are opposed, I wonder if you really know how valuable the facility is to our community.