How did the North Carolina State Veterans Home in Fayetteville go from being ranked among the top nursing homes in the country in 2022 to the brink of closing its doors just a year later?
And what prompted the facility’s unexpected shutdown, and where will its former occupants go?
These are the types of questions that residents, family members and veteran advocates have been grappling with since Nov. 21, when the N.C. Dept. of Military and Veteran Affairs (DMVA) told residents and caregivers of the State Veterans Home it would be shutting down the facility in a little over two months. The home is located at 214 Cochran Ave., Fayetteville, adjacent to the Fayetteville VA Medical Center.
The DMVA manages five state-owned nursing homes in North Carolina, contracting with PruittHealth, a for-profit healthcare company, to operate the facilities. The homes provide veterans and qualifying family members a living space and in-patient medical treatment and rehabilitation services, with costs that can be reduced with Veterans Affairs benefits.
As of this week, the DMVA said 17 of the initial 85 residents are still at the facility, which closes Feb. 1.
In a Dec. 14 statement, the DMVA officially cited the building’s “significant repair needs and structural deficiencies” as the reason for its decision, as well as features of the terrain that make the structure prone to flooding and water intrusion. The DMVA estimates it will cost more than $20 million to make the repairs. (In contrast, the newly constructed Kernersville State Veterans Home — a two-hour trip northwest of Fayetteville — cost upwards of $27 million to build.)
“There is no immediate solution or long-term fix,” the DMVA’s statement said. “Given the structural deficiencies, the high cost of repairs, and natural topography issues, the Department decided to close and replace the facility.”
Family members of patients at the nursing home describe being blindsided by the news. Crystal Pyle said her husband’s father was among the 85 patients at the facility, and the short notice of the move had taken a toll on her family.
“It was a stressful time for him and us,” Pyle said in a message to CityView. “Very sad of what all the veterans are having to go through.”
Pyle’s father-in-law died on Dec. 23. She said she believes the stress of the move contributed to his death.
Renee Martin, whose 90-year-old father has dementia and resided in the memory care wing of the State Veterans Home, said the journey to finding him a new home has been challenging on a number of levels. Martin said she had to pay $3,500 upfront to reserve a spot for her dad at a nearby nursing home, because none of the other state veterans homes had a guaranteed spot for him, and she wasn’t comfortable having him stay too far away.
“I told my Dad I will never be far from him,” Martin said. “And he may not remember me saying that, but I remember it, and I am his advocate … Sometimes it's not as easy as just, ‘Well, let's transport your dad hours away,’ or ‘Let's say we're going to do this’ — when at this point, he's not even guaranteed a spot.”
The DMVA’s decision to shut down the State Veterans Home has also drawn criticism from the North Carolina Veterans Council (NCVC), a coalition of 17 veterans service groups in North Carolina. The council lobbies for legislation to advance the interests of veterans in North Carolina.
Jay Wood, the commander of the NCVC, said the group’s leadership has been unable to engage in meaningful conversation with the DMVA on the issue, despite multiple attempts at collaboration. He told CityView the NCVC and DMVA have had their differences in the past, but the agency has never stonewalled them to this extent on an issue before.
“Our experience thus far is they've tried to do everything they can to keep us from participating,” Wood told CityView, referring to discussions about the closure.
In response to CityView’s questions about the DMVA’s relationship and its recent communication with the NCVC, the DMVA pointed to an email from Gaskin to Wood sent this Monday. In the email, Gaskin described prior communications with Woods as “containing misinformation” and unsubstantiated claims.
“One would hope that your service and position with such a needed organization, regardless of your personal disagreement with a decision, would negate disparaging attempts on NCDMVA’s commitment to veterans,” Gaskin wrote.
What prompted the shutdown?
The DMVA hasn’t released additional details to the public about the closure since its initial announcement in November or in subsequent media responses. The department referred CityView’s request for the nature of the “structural deficiencies” and “natural topography issues” back to the initial Dec. 14 statement and an information sheet containing similar information about the closure.
Gaskin visited the veterans home on Nov. 21 to announce the closure in a meeting with residents and their caregivers. Several individuals with first-hand knowledge of the situation say they were told in that meeting that the facility was being shuttered because of an extensive mold problem.
A current employee at the veterans home, whom CityView is granting anonymity because of concerns they will face retaliation, said the patients living there were told black mold was the reason behind the closing.
“But it is being closed due to black mold that can be fixed for 30 million but can't guarantee that it won't come back,” the employee said in a message to CityView. They said staff had placed industrial-sized air purifiers around the facility in the months prior to the disclosure of the mold, an observation corroborated by a resident of the facility and a family member of a resident in comments to CityView.
CityView acquired a picture of one of the air purifiers, an air scrubber estimated to cost about $4,000. The filtration system can capture a wide variety of air contaminants, including mold and fungal spores.
While Martin didn’t accompany her father to the Nov. 21 meeting, she said a close friend of hers was present that day and had been told mold was the main reason for closing the facility. She said the issue has not been brought up since.
“Nothing else has been said about mold from the facility since that meeting,” Martin said. “I have not heard anything from any staff about it.”
Resident Samuel Richardson said he had learned from the conversation with the DMVA representatives on Nov. 21 that mold was a significant problem. He said residents were told it would cost between $25-27 million for the state to remove the mold, with no guarantee it would stay gone.
For Richardson, the mold issue did not come as a shock. He said he began to suspect black mold was growing throughout the facility after he temporarily needed to vacate his room for cleaning upon finding mold in his shower. He said he had also experienced unexplained symptoms that worsened over time, including headaches, blurry vision, sinus issues and throat discomfort, which are frequent signs of mold toxicity.
Richardson said he confronted DMVA representatives and PruittHealth management at the Nov. 21 meeting, telling them they “threw under the bus” by not dealing with the mold problem before. “If it was mold in the school for the children,” he recalled telling them, “they would have been moved out.”
Richardson said his follow-up attempts to gain more information about the mold and speak with PruittHealth staff about it have also been unsuccessful.
John McGee, a former resident of the home who left the facility in early 2020, said he also noticed significant issues with ceiling leaks between 2018 and 2019 at the veterans home. He said water frequently came down from the ceiling “like a hose was on.”
“The floors would be soaked,” McGee told CityView. “They clean up the floor, and they just leave the ceiling tiles out. The ones that had busted, they would put off to the side, but they let it air dry.”
McGee said residents had raised concerns about mold growing in the gap between the false ceiling and the roof since he got to the facility in 2016, and that other maintenance problems routinely went unrepaired, including leaks in individual patient rooms.
“Everybody knows when you have a gap directly under a roof and you got [it] wet — and including all the material in that area above the ceiling — mold,” McGee said. “They were talking about mold when I got there.”
The DMVA has denied the presence of mold in the facility.
“A recent test in November validates there is No Fungal Growth present in the State Veterans Home Fayetteville (SVHF),” Tammy Martin, the DMVA director of communications, said in an email to CityView Monday.
A former maintenance assistant at the State Veterans Home who resigned last month said they were surprised and confused about the facility's closure. The maintenance staff kept the facility in “tip-top shape,” the former employee said, though there were some repairs needed to stop leaky ceilings in certain areas and to resolve minor kitchen issues.
“It kind of shocked me when they came out the blue and they said that they was closing facility because of maintenance issues,” the former employee said, who also requested anonymity because of retaliation concerns from PruittHealth, which is contracted to run the nursing home.
PruittHealth redirected CityView’s questions about the closing to the DMVA.
The former maintenance employee acknowledged major repairs were needed to address the roof, but believes it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands, not millions, to fix it.
“It's going to cost a lot to get that roof repaired,” they said. “They're going to have to tear all that out. There's been leaks all through the ceiling. … And it's probably going to cost them a pretty penny because all that wood inside the attic is kind of rotted. And I was careful where I was stepping on it, because one bad step, I was going to go through the roof.”
Still, the former employee did not see the roof as an insurmountable issue necessitating the facility’s abandonment, but more of a financial burden that DMVA and PruittHealth may not want to take on.
“Because that's a big fairy tale,” they said. “That facility is not in bad shape.”
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part series documenting the closing of the State Veterans Home in Fayetteville, other issues that have cropped up during the move and oversight concerns about the DMVA, raised by veterans advocacy groups.
Contact Evey Weisblat at cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
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