WEST PARIS — An independently operated nursing home has given its residents and staff 60 days to relocate after announcing Thursday that it would be shutting its doors after 46 years.
Roger Wilday, business manager for Ledgeview Living Center, said it has become impossible to “continue to pay our employees underneath the current reimbursement system for the state of Maine.”
That, coupled with a 2016 law that raised Maine’s minimum wage to $10 an hour, created a perfect storm from which Ledgeview has been unable to rebound.
“MaineCare has a system of pay for MaineCare residents, and the payment system is not high enough (for Ledgeview) to be profitable,” Wilday said. “The increased minimum wage meant that more of our costs were escalated, and we just weren’t getting enough money to be in that reimbursement level.”
He said that he looked at different ways the nursing home could stay open, but that keeping the center going “has already been a struggle for a number of years.”
“Things have escalated year to year to year, and the minimum-wage increase was just the final straw,” Wilday said.
Ledgeview Living Center houses 72 residents and employs 122 people.
The facility was built and opened in the early 1970s as a 105-bed living center and nursing home, Wilday said.
It was managed by Wilday’s parents, Lawrence and Elaine, on behalf of the Seventh-day Adventist Church throughout the 1970s and ’80s. In July 1988 Lawrence and Elaine Wilday bought the living center from the church and have owned it since then.
Roger Wilday said the expected closure date of Ledgeview is Oct. 9, and that the residents and employees were issued 60-day notices to relocate.
He said Ledgeview and the Maine Department of Health and Human Services are working to “make this as smooth of a transition as possible for everybody.”
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