At full capacity and with a waiting list of more than 70 sick children, Sunshine Children”™s Home and Rehabilitation Center has no choice but to expand, according to its director.
Yet a $30 million expansion plan for the center in the town of New Castle has met with opposition from some concerned neighbors.
Sunshine Children”™s Home, owned by Spring Valley Road LLC and MSAF Group LLC, operates on a 33-acres site at 15 Spring Valley Road in a largely wooded residential neighborhood in New Castle near the Ossining town border. The center specializes in long-term and terminal residential pediatric care for children and has seen a considerable rise in its number of patients since it opened in 2009.
The expansion plan, approved by the state Department of Health last year, will increase the facility”™s size from 19,000 square feet of space to 146,000 square feet, Sunshine Children”™s Home Director Linda Mosiello said.
New Castle Planning Director Sabrina D. Charney Hull in a May report said the project will increase the number of beds from 54 to 122 and will increase parking from 96 spaces to 144. The project would also add medical equipment and include improvements to visitor rooms and classroom space for Sunshine”™s on-site school.
An additional 92 employees would be hired under the plan, increasing the center staff to 187.
“We desperately need this space in order to improve the quality of care and living for our children and to make room for the overwhelming number of children who need to be here,” Mosiello said. “Our goal is to soon be able to care for them with better medical facilities and to provide a true school experience for them.”
Most patients are technologically dependent and require devices such as breathing machines and defibrillators to survive. Mosiello said many are born with life-altering medical conditions, but others are survivors of car accidents and other tragedies. The home takes in children from birth to 18 years of age who require post-acute medical care or rehabilitative therapy.
“Kids 10 to 15 years ago didn”™t survive much of what they do (survive) now” with improved health care, Mosiello said. “Ultimately, we knew we had to expand because of the changing landscape in health care. It”™s created a need.” A host of hospitals are looking to refer patients, she said.
Still, the expansion plans have met with resistance from neighbors.
On Sunshine Home Site Development, a website that surfaced this year, a group that identifies itself as a “collection of residents, families and environmentalists” criticized an approval process it called “swift and irresponsible,” an “inadequate” traffic study and a failure to address water usage and sewage disposal at the expanded center. The opposition group says its mission is to work with town officials and residents to protect the character of the neighborhood of single-family homes on 2-acre plots.
Hull, the New castle planning director, found the proposed plan “does not appear to have a significant environmental impact.”
Mosiello said the planned expansion is “more than appropriate” for the size of their site and surrounding acreage.
“There”™s a lot of information out there that”™s not accurate,” Mosiello said. “People need to come see what we do. I invite anyone who doubts us to see how sick these kids are. They have nowhere to go and there”™s a lot more of them out there.”
Sunshine”™s owners took over the New Castle property in September 2009 after St. Mary”™s Rehabilitation Center for Children closed there while housing 44 children. Mosiello, then an assistant vice president at St. Mary”™s, said she was brought in as the director to close an operation that was losing money and rebuild it from the ground up.
After the facility was modernized, Mosiello said, Sunshine”™s name grew and referrals began coming in from area hospitals. An application for the expansion was first filed with the town last December and was revised in March after several meetings with town officials.
Mosiello did not have a time frame for the project”™s completion, but said her initial groundbreaking goal of December now seems out of reach.
Mosiello said on one recent weekday morning she received two more referrals from an area hospital. She said she expects the calls to continue to come in, but the center cannot provide constant nursing and medical care unless the expansion becomes a reality.
