Community groups file legal motion to ensure local input into LICH’s future

A coalition of neighborhood civic organizations have filed a “motion to intervene” in the ongoing legal saga over the future of Long Island College Hospital (LICH). Their goal, they wrote in the filing, is to ensure that they, as stakeholders in the hospital’s future, have some input in the decision process over who will be selected as the new hospital operator.

They also want the state Supreme Court to require that LICH’s assets and medical records be placed in a protective trust that will safeguard them from “theft or exploitation.”

The group consists of the Boerum Hill Association, Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association, Cobble Hill Association, Brooklyn Heights Association, Wyckoff Gardens Association, and Riverside Tenants’ Association. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio also joined in the motion’s filing, as his legal team has been participating in the existing–and separate–legal proceedings between LICH and its current operator, SUNY Downstate.

As a result of that separate case, SUNY Downstate’s two-and-a-half-year-old ownership claim over LICH was revoked on August 20 by state Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Demarest, who ordered them to either return the hospital’s reigns to its former owner or to find a new operator.

The former owner, Continuum Health Partners, refused to take LICH back, stating that they are in no position to do so at the moment.

Other LICH advocacy stakeholders involved in this separate, ongoing, case, include the New York State Nurses Association and SEIU 1199.

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