Over Zrinski's Objection, NorCo Council Approves Gracedale Oversight Committee

Despite a tongue-lashing from Executive Tara Zrinski that they were stepping on her toes, NorCo Council voted last night to establish a Gracedale Oversight Committee proposed by Council member Dave Holland and supported by fellow Council members Lori Vargo Heffner, Tom Giovanni, Jason Boulette, Theresa Fadem and even Jeff Warren. It was opposed by Council members Ken Kraft, Kelly Keegan and Nadeem Qayyum. Qayyum had argued in support of the committee, so I think he probably intended to vote Yes. 

Zrinski, who had just finished chiding Council over their refusal to go along with her choice of a Fiscal Director at the salary she wanted to pay, amazingly claimed that County Council has no authority to provide oversight of her administration and was crossing the line into actual administration. She argued that Council's sole role under the Home Rule Charter is to adopt legislation, enact a budget and confirm appointments. 

This is nonsense. 

Northampton County's Home Rule Charter specifically grants 13 specific powers to County Council, including the power to require periodic special reports, conduct investigations and even issue subpoenas. In short, it has oversight authority. The Home Rule Charter also clearly states that all residual powers of the county are vested in County Council.

In contrast, the Executive has no residual power. She does have administrative authority over day-to-day matters, but is specifically required to present information regarding the business and affairs of the county as Council might request. That is the whole point of County Council Committees. 

The problem with government, on all levels, is that the Executive branch has grown too strong. This is how we end up with statewide lockdowns or executive orders that bypass the legislature. There has been too little oversight. 

Zrinski's fear, as I understand her, is that County Council would be taking over the administration of Gracedale. Nothing in Holland's resolution (you can read it here), remotely suggests any such intent. It specifically states it is being formed because Council "has a unique duty of oversight to ensure that Gracedale residents are receiving medical, respite and rehabilitation care under the auspices of Northampton County in compliance with all applicable state and federal laws and regulations."

Something wrong with that?

When asked by Council member Kelly Keegan why this Committee was needed, Holland noted that Council has just established a new department for Gracedale, and it makes sense to have a standing committee for that department as it does for others. Without it, there would be no oversight of Gracedale at all. 

Kraft argued that Gracedale could be included as part of Human Services and accused Holland of "overreaching." But as Boulette pointed out, Human Services includes a wide array of different departments, from Aging to Children and Youth, and even Veterans Affairs. He noted that in a committee earlier that day, Gracedale was covered for just 15 minutes. He and Vargo Heffner both argued that Council does have the authority to provide oversight. "I see nothing wrong with the term 'oversight,' "said Vargo Heffner. "People could be uncomfortable with it, and I don't think it implies that anybody is going to be telling anybody else what to do." She added that every Council Committee is, in fact, an oversight committee. 

Fadem made the point that an oversight committee is necessary because Gracedale is "in crisis mode. They have a Provisional II license." 

Next week, I'll fill you in on the other matters considered by County Council last night during its regular and committee hearings. 

Happy 4th! 

Father Who Left Unattended Child in Car Charged With Homicide

Below is a news release from the NorCo DA:

Father Who Left Child Unattended in Car Charged With Homicide by BernieOHare

NorCo Council to Consider Gracedale, Fiscal Director Salary and Senior Centers Tonight

Tonight, Northampton County Council will be discussing Gracedale, the Fiscal Director Salary and Senior Centers.

Gracedale - An Update is scheduled during the Human Services Committee, and it is supposed to come from Director Sue Wandalowski. Why? Just weeks ago, Gracedale was removed from her portfolio, so why is the mouthpiece? And she herself has stated in several of her defensive presentations that she's no expert. She is defensive and inaccurate when it comes to the nursing home. The person who should know what is going on is the Administrator, but she has only rarely spoken. 

When the full County Council meets, they will consider the establishment of a Gracedale Oversight Committee, which hopefully will be headed by Dave Holland, a former Administrator at both Gracedale and in Monroe County. 

That's overdue, especially after the latest visit from the Department of Health that included: (1) another resident (I think we're at four, but he's called Resident 1) who wandered off and who had to be brought back by police; (2) an agency LPN who documented having provided medications and performed tests on the resident while he was wandering the streets of Nazareth, a pretty neat trick; and (3) a biker resident (he's Resident 2) who never should have been admitted and was hoarding meds like oxycodone and bringing in booze and a knife. 

One of my readers, a "local healthcare expert," had this to say:

A friendly review from a local healthcare expert… resident 1 was not assessed properly and should have been on a locked unit based on the resident’s mental health status. There was poor or likely no communication between the aide, lpn and nursing supervisor. The lpns and nursing supervisors are very weak as demonstrated by the various severe deficiencies. Resident 2 should never have been admitted to Gracedale. It was obviously done to fill a bed. No plans were developed to manage the resident’s substance abuse disorder. He belongs in a rehab facility, not a nursing home. The bed is better left empty than admitting a trainwreck violent resident who Gracedale is likely not even able to bill for. I am sure he is there for free care. Dumb. Who wants grandpa living with a drug user biker with dangerous behaviors. And get rid of the smoking. Very few nursing homes allow it. It is a risk for a variety of reasons and takes staff away from care to supervise smoking. Lastly, I see that Gracedale is already partially under the direction of a nursing home management company - CHR. That nugget is in the last sentence of the plan of correction and should be communicated to the general public. The state directed them to use a state authorized company to train the staff as the state determined the home (really the county) is unable to do so. And by the way, the plan of correction is overly complicated and just not doable for any nursing home. So many steps in these processes that no nursing home could comply with. After the plan of correction is completed, run it through quality assurance committee to develop more simplified processes that are doable. Shrink the home down to 350-400 residents, get somebody in there like CHR or other qualified outsourced professionals to run the operation, and rebuild from the ground up. Crazy things can and do happen at every healthcare facility whether it be a hospital or nursing home. It is people taking care of people. You must have systems to deal with those situations. Gracedale has no systems. I hope the county officials read this for the benefit of the poor souls who live there.

Senior Centers. - The state recently cut $400,000 from the county's budget, which is used to fund senior centers. There might be more cuts if and when the state legislature adopts a budget. This will be discussed in the Human Services Committee. 

Fiscal Director. - Last week, the county lost out on a CPA with 30 years of accounting experience because they insisted on setting the pay at a much lower salary than the Executive wanted to provide. It's true that County Council. with some limitations, sets the salary. So Council will be asked to give the Executive authority to negotiate a salary with a proposed hire. 

NorCo Council Member Jason Boulette's Facebook Page Includes Explanations of His Votes

Jason Boulette is one of four new members of Northampton County Council. I want to draw your attention to his Facebook page. Of course, much of it is self-promotional, which is to be expected from someone who must periodically seek public approbation. But I like his occasional "Transparency Tuesday," in which he explains his votes and gets occasional feedback from other Council members and, of course, the public. In Lehigh County, Ron Beitler does much the same thing. He's a bit busy now with Controller Mark Pinsley's proposed intangible property tax, which is disguised as a "wealth tax."

Bethlehem City Council Lacks Quorum at June 16 Meeting

Only three members of Bethlehem City Council (Colleen Laird, Bryan Callahan and Hillary Kwiatek) bothered to show up for its June 16 meeting. This resulted in a lack of a quorum, and the result of this is that no business could be conducted. 

Public comment was still received for nearly an hour.  

Pa. State Budget Late Again

Pennsylvania's General Assembly has done it again. It has failed to adopt a budget by the June 30 deadline. In fact, the state senate has actually recessed until next week. Since 2015, the state budget has been late 9 times. The last budget was adopted 135 days late. 

Pa. DOH - Gracedale Had Yet Another Elopement, a Dishonest LPN and a Resident Who Probably Does Not Belong There

Although NorCo Exec Tara Zrinski should be commended for an ambitious if expensive plan to save Gracedale, the fact remains that the beleaguered home in serios trouble. It was downgraded from a regular to a Provisional I license late last year, and that has recently been downgraded to a Provisional II. Gracedale is the only nursing home in the state with a Provisional II license, and as Council member Dave Holland has warned, this could result in serious repercussions. The state could bar the home from accepting new residents, could stop Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement or take over the facility with more competent management than it has had. 

This downgrade is undoubtedly due to a DOH inspection on May 16, which you can read for yourself here. It is a damning indictment of the home's management. For the fourth time, a resident just walked out of the facility and was gone for five hours before a police officer called at 1 am. An agency LPN falsified her reports. And another resident who for some reason is allowed to come and go as he pleases as per his doctor, appears to be bringing in booze and drugs and is getting loaded, high or both. 

In a recent report to NorCo Council, Exec Tara Zrinski claimed that the root cause of all these issues occurred because the county was too lax about who it admitted. She said all that changed when Michelle Morton came aboard as Administrator. 

Zrinski is wrong. The resident who took a powder (he's called Resident 1) was first admitted to Gracedale in December 2025. At that time, Michelle Morton had already been administrator for nine months. 

On May 13, Resident 1 decided to wander off  at around 5 pm. Though two CNAs noticed that Resident 1 was missing and reported this to an agency LPN responsible for this resident. She did nothing to alert anyone that he was missing. She instead documented that she had given him prescribed medications, even though he was not there. She also reported bogus blood glucose levels and then scratched them out, falsely claiming that he had declined the test. 

In the meantime, Resident 1 had somehow made it from Gracedale to outside of Nazareth's police station, about 1.5 miles away. A police officer noticed him milling about around 10 pm and called facility to see if anyone was missing. 

Once again, Gracedale allowed a resident to just walk off. What's worse, an agency LPN falsely documented that he had received prescribed medications and falsely reported blood glucose levels. 

Resident 2 was admitted to Gracedale before Michelle Morton's time, and I have to wonder why on earth he was admitted. He had a history of drug and alcohol abuse."I am a biker," he told one nurse. That's what we do; we drink, smoke, play pool, and party." He also had a habit of pocketing narcotics provided to him for "pain." For reasons that mystify me, his doctor allowed him to go on "independent leaves of absence," during which he could have been selling those pocketed meds, which include oxycodone. He would return to the facility smelling of booze and would be belligerent and exhibit violent behavior. 

After one of these episodes, a nurse cleaning his room found the following items in a wrapped up blanket: " 12 to 15 marijuana vape cartridges, one bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two 12 ounce (oz) empty bottles of Fireball, one 12 oz empty bottle of Southern Comfort whiskey, a large hunting knife, a wallet with $43.00 and cards, and a container of Resident 2's untaken prescribed medications, which were identified by the pharmacist as six allopurinol 100 mg tablets (prevents and lowers uric acid levels), one atorvastatin 20 mg tablet (used to lower cholesterol), two duloxetine 60 mg capsules (antidepressant), eight gabapentin 400 mg capsules (pain medication), two loratadine 10 mg tablets (allergy medication), 36 melatonin 5 mg tablets (natural sleep aid), one multivitamin tablet, 27 oxycodone 10 mg tablets (opioid), 11 of which were partially dissolved, two ropinirole 1 mg tablets (used to treat restless leg syndrome) , tablet of trazadone 150 mg (antidepressant), two vitamin D3 capsules, one Tylenol 325 mg tablet, and two Tessalon Perles (cough medication). The police confiscated the vape, cartridges, and knife."

This guy is a walking pharmacy! 

He was also caught on one occasion snorting what he said was antifungal powder. 

The DOH concluded that Gracedale failed to prevent Resident 2 from pocketing medications that were administered, returning to the facility intoxicated more than once, and having narcotic medications, illegal marijuana vape cartridges, alcohol, and a weapon in a room shared with other residents. This is an  Immediate Jeopardy situation, meaning that residents are at risk of serious injury, harm, impairment, or death, requiring immediate corrective action.

DOH was responding to one complaint and two reported incidents, which tell me that Gracedale, to its credit, turned itself in. 

Zrinski Posts Her State of County Address

 

Last week, NorCo Exec Tara Zrinski delivered her first "State of the County" address at Bethlehem's Nation Museum of Industrial History. Though unable to attend, I did watch her address on Facebook and wrote about it. Zrinski has also just posted her speech on her Substack, including all the photos she used. 

What I like best among these images is her plan for the Gracedale campus. She plans to convert the existing facility, which crams four residents into a room, into aging-in-place apartments. There would also be a 700-bed skilled nursing facility, medical offices, a dialysis center (Gracedale currently does dialysis in house), a retail center and workforce housing. There appears to be no interference with any of the existing farmland. 

Without question, this is an ambitious project and merits very close scrutiny. But if the county wishes to continue to provide a nursing home, it is necessary. The existing Gracedale facility was built for a different time. While four residents in one room is still permissible, the trend is to reduce occupancy to two. 

The existing facility could easily be converted into apartments for seniors and the disabled who wish to age in place. I could see getting HUD involved and using the Housing Authority to manage this building. 

There are lots of questions to be considered. But this plan is an excellent starting point. 

America at 250

Blogger's Note: Oliver Kornetzke, who wrote the essay I publish below, is a political commentator whose substack is located here. He has a rather damning indictment of this country on the eve of our 250th. 

250 years. Two hundred and fifty fucking years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.

Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.

We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to. We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home. We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol and symbols are cheaper than healthcare and housing and the therapy that would actually help. We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness and medical debt and student debt several times over and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.

We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.

Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.

250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating. And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.

Happy Birthday America! You have never looked more like yourself!"

NorCo Council Considers Separate Committee for Gracedale

Ordinarily, Gracedale is just one of several departments covered whenever NorCo Council reviews human services. Several Council members are now suggesting the need for a separate committee just to cover the nursing home. In view of Executive Tara Zrinski's plan to expand operations there with medical offices, housing and even a retail strip, this is really necessary.  In addition to considering the merits of this plan, millions in taxpayer dollars will almost certainly be needed to make up a deficit this year, Moreover, the county really needs to prioritize getting its Provisional II license back on track.

According to the PA DOH nursing home facility locator, there was a visit to Gracedale on May 14. But as of the time I write this story, inspection results are still unavailable. This visit likely was the result of both an elopement and contraband brought in by a resident. This is something Exec Tara Zrinski mentioned in her last executive report. 

Fed Ed Returning to Allentown This Week

Former Allentown Mayor Edwin "Fed Ed" Pawlowski, who has been released from federal prison to a halfway house in Philly, is expected to be in Allentown this week. He'll have lunch with a few supporters. He apparently has already lined up a job.