Sears Discusses Hospital Closings With Board 2
BY THOMAS COGAN

Sears said that the Berger Commission, which traveled throughout New York state to conduct hearings to determine the current state of hospitals, held just one meeting in New York City, on a Friday night in Staten Island, having notified the public of the meeting only the day before.

City Councilmember Helen Sears spoke to the January meeting of Community Board 2 about hospital closings and suggested steps she believes should be taken to establish effective healthcare services in every community. Also, perhaps anticipating another meeting about landmark status in Sunnyside Gardens to be held in the middle of the month, several Sunnyside residents stood up at the meeting to oppose making the neighborhood a landmark district, while some landmark proponents countered with their own remarks.

Sears said that the Berger Commission, which traveled throughout New York state to conduct hearings to determine the current state of hospitals, held just one meeting in New York City, on a Friday night in Staten Island, having notified the public of the meeting only the day before. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn formed a committee on hospital closings and put Sears in charge of it. Sears said she conducted a meeting in each of the five boroughs, in the form of roundtable discussions, each of which lasted more than three hours, she said. The Berger Commission requested information from these hearings in advance of its preliminary and final reports. The material submitted included the statement that the city must be treated as five entities, not one. She said that these two reports, issued last year in May and September, recommended closing several hospitals upstate and on Long Island, and five in the city, including Parkway Hospital in Forest Hills. All were described as underutilized. Sears said that in a recent 10- year period, there were 36 hospital closings in the state, 14 of them in New York City; and now these. The state will get $2 billion in federal funds to close these hospitals, with not a cent of it to be used for any sort of hospital improvement.

Sears said hospitals are greatly in need of money, and at present are getting only part of what they need from patients' payments. She said it is fallacious for the public to believe that if medical costs are high, as they certainly are, money for all manner of medical service and treatment must be unfailingly available at hospitals. The city's hospitals must try to close the technological gap that obtains at so many of them, and they must deal with a great many uninsured patients that show up at emergency rooms. Sears proposes a capital investment fund stocked with moneys from health maintenance organizations, or HMOs. She said it would be in the interest of HMOs to invest in a fund dedicated to hospital improvement. Among the paths to improvement would be the development of primary care centers that would stem the current situation that finds the uninsured turning to emergency rooms as their primary care physicians. Out of such a fund, there could be development of all-around hospital care in Queens, she said. With such development, Sears pointed out, Queens residents would not be forced, as they are now, to go to Manhattan for specialty care.

Just after Thanksgiving, officials of the Landmarks Preservation Commission led a meeting at the Sunnyside Senior Center suggesting that landmark status for Sunnyside Gardens was a near-certainty, and could perhaps be in effect before springtime. There were a few voices among the attendees who said that though they were Gardens residents and vitally concerned with preserving the neighborhood's integrity, they were against landmark status because it would encode bureaucratic restrictions that would hinder residents' attempts at home improvement. They did not carry that meeting, but at the Board 2 meeting, held also at Sunnyside Senior Center, they restated their objections- though not without eliciting replies from landmark proponents and drawing a "Boo!" or two. At the November meeting, 47th Street resident Michael Meola said that trying to preserve a perfect mid-1920s atmosphere was foolish, and said so again at the Board 2 meeting. Meola, a resident of the Gardens for the past two years, said the alterations he made on his home were carefully thought out and executed. He said he sought the opinion of John Young of the Department of City Planning in Queens and eventually got a letter from Young expressing approval of the work that had been done. But Laura Heim, an architect and Sunnyside Gardens resident, said that current restrictions, if they could be called that, do nothing to prevent questionable construction in the Gardens. Deck building, for instance, should require a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, but decks have been built there without it, she said. She was dismissive of City Planning's actions in the matter. Her husband told Meola in front of the meeting that his renovations violate the spirit of Sunnyside Gardens. But a man from 48th Street, who said his house is paid off, expressed contempt for LPC officials who would try to tell him how he should repair it. He added that the LPC was "just another city agency, and how do any of them merit our trust?" Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley brought the debate to a close by saying that the Sunnyside Gardens landmark issue is obviously fervent, and would be taken up again at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, January 17, when not only officials from LPC but City Planning and the Department of Buildings also, would conduct a meeting- at Sunnyside Senior Center, of course.