Cherry Valley Fights To Keep Health Center Operational

By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
CHERRY VALLEY

Amidst ongoing financial woes for the Cherry Valley Community Health Center, the New York State Comptroller’s office released a report critical of the Town of Cherry Valley’s budgeting. Town Supervisor Thomas Garretson disputed the results at a recent town board meeting, minutes show. Officials say they are working to get the institution, founded in 1978, out of the squeeze through a combination of fundraising, grantwriting, increased revenues and cutting certain costs.

The health center is owned and operated by the Town of Cherry Valley. Medical staff are leased from Bassett Healthcare Network. Taxpayers, through the town, cover deficits in the center’s budget. Patients do not need to live in Cherry Valley. Currently, neighboring municipalities do not contribute to the center’s budget.

The November 7 report from the comptroller’s office was a general budget review. Though officials did not identify issues with unrelated portions of the budget, the report says the office “determined that the Town’s preliminary budget significantly underbudgeted the appropriations for the Cherry Valley Community Health Center,” adding that “even if Town officials had included more realistic budget appropriations, the Board would still need to include additional revenues or financing sources in its budget accordingly.”

The report said the center’s “dedicated patients included 667 Town residents and 824 non-Town residents” at the start of 2025.

The report says the town board’s “unrealistically low” expenditure estimates for the center—around $495,000.00 rather than the comptroller office’s projection of around $1,000,000.00—enabled them to decrease the tax levy in the preliminary budget by 45 percent. Though the report says the town accurately estimated $540,000.00 in revenue, “without a source of additional revenues for the Health Center, the Board could nearly deplete the Town’s general fund by the end of 2026” by taking “$425,000 in transfers of non-Health Center revenue to subsidize the operations,” the report reads.

According to draft minutes of the November 13 town board meeting, Supervisor Garretson disagreed with the report’s findings and expressed his “dissatisfaction” directly with the office multiple times.

“The report stated we did not establish a separate account [for the center] which is untrue,” meeting minutes paraphrase Garretson as saying. “Everything was in the general fund before and we set up the health center checking account following their recommendation. Which they basically either ignored or [Supervisor Garretson] was not sure what their thought was. As far as the revenue running out, they factored in the expense and did not factor in the anticipated revenue coming in for the health center.”

Garretson “does not agree with the report,” according to the draft minutes. He did not respond to interview requests for this story by press time.

The town board voted unanimously to approve the preliminary budget, draft meeting minutes show.

Lisa Hershey, a Cherry Valley resident who was appointed to a committee to support the center and help craft a path forward, told AllOtsego the center’s already-difficult situation was made harder with a technology charge this spring. She said the center had been spending around $25,000.00 per year to Bassett on patient management software, but with a new system, the cost went up to around $150,000.00. For one year, Hershey said, “Of the revenue that we take in from our payers—meaning insurance, Medicare, Medicaid—about 40 percent of the revenue that we take in goes to Bassett IT.”

The comptroller’s report factored this charge of around $12,707.00 per month into its assessment.

Hershey said the center is working to get off of Bassett’s IT and onto Athena, a much cheaper software designed for smaller providers.

“It’ll cost us $10.00 a transaction, as opposed to, like $40.00-something,” she said.

Bassett Healthcare Network officials could not be reached by press time.

That will not be enough to cover the gap, however. Community members recently filed papers to incorporate a nonprofit, Friends of the Cherry Valley Community Health Center, to support the center and solicit donations. At the October town board meeting, another committee member, Kim Thompson, reported that the center had $65,309.00 in its donation account, minutes show.

Officials are also seeking grant options and have inquired with at least one other municipality about supporting the center.

“There’s a lot of people that use that health center that are second, third generation, that probably wouldn’t go to the doctor if it wasn’t there,” Hershey said, stressing the importance of the rural healthcare center to the region’s residents.

Hershey said the issue is “a microcosm of what’s going on with healthcare in this country.

“But our problem isn’t a $10 million deficit, so it’s a solvable problem, right?”