The State University of New York is gearing up to lay off workers at the beleaguered Long Island College Hospital as bids and negotiations for the site’s redevelopment continue.
Between 300 and 350 hospital staffers will be handed pink slips soon, a union representative told the Brooklyn Paper.
“There are currently over 1,400 employees on the payroll at a facility that serves a limited number of patients,” SUNY spokesperson David Doyle told the paper.
Warning notices about layoffs came after community groups and unions reached a settlement with the state over a lawsuit looking to halt the hospital’s closure, a Service Employees International Union 1199 representative told the paper. The state kicked off another round of bidding following the agreement, and 1199 knew the hospital would shutter in May if no buyers emerged, a spokesperson told the paper.
The new evaluation process for the bidding gauges proposals on a point system weighing medical services as two-thirds of the score and the remainder in terms of financial commitments. State representatives will have the majority voice in determining a proposal’s score, while representatives of the nurses unions and community groups will have less than half in scoring the medical category, according to the Brooklyn Paper. [Brooklyn Paper] — Julie Strickland