CSEA rejects Maplewood Manor nursing home contract

Maplewood Manor, Saratoga County's public nursing home in Ballston Spa.

The public employee union representing workers at the Saratoga County-owned Maplewood Manor nursing home has rejected a proposed contract with the facility’s prospective private buyer.

Rejection of the proposed agreement between the Civil Service Employees Association and Zenith Care Health Group came by a vote of 47-19, said CSEA spokesman Stephen Madarasz.

“The situation is really very much in question at this point,” Madarasz said Monday. “The prospective buyer has stated they wanted a labor agreement before they finalized the sale.”

A representative of Zenith, which owns six other nursing homes in New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, could not be reached for comment Monday.

Madarasz wouldn’t say why the contract was rejected by union members, but it’s been widely reported that Zenith was seeking to cut the pay of some job classifications, as well as eliminate jobs. He said only about half the union employees eligible to vote cast ballots on the contract offer.

Zenith officials have previously said $4 million to $5 million needs to be cut from the annual budget to make Maplewood Manor profitable.

Saratoga County has an agreement to sell the he 277-bed facility on Ballston Avenue to Zenith Health for $14.1 million.

County officials have said they are selling the facility because it was sustaining multimillion-dollar losses that depleted the county surplus and led to property tax increases.

County leaders took proposals from prospective buyers and selected Zenith in December 2013. Since then, the parties have been working to get the required Department of Health approval, which came last October.

Late last year, Zenith began trying to negotiate a new contract with the CSEA, which represents the Saratoga County workforce.

“With the rejection, there’s no guarantee what they will do,” Madarasz said. “We would like to go back to the bargaining table, but we don’t know what they will do.”

He credited Zenith for offering to negotiate an agreement, noting that CSEA has had “a variety of experiences” in recent years as private entities have purchased a number of formerly publicly owned nursing homes across the state.

In a joint statement issued Jan. 2, CSEA and Zenith said “each side has compromised” to try to reach a contract agreement. The terms that CSEA members were voting on weren’t released.

While the sale is pending, the facility has continued to be operated by Saratoga County. About 240 people work at Maplewood.