Santiago vows to ‘rebuild trust’ in veterans’ services

Jon Santiago knows the pandemic left Massachusetts looking askance at its veterans’ services after scores of COVID deaths amid scandals over mismanagement at two long-term care facilities for veterans. Reforming the embattled soldiers’ home system and instilling confidence in his office, Santiago said, are his top priorities as Gov. Maura Healey’s secretary of veterans’ services, a newly created cabinet-level post.   

“Really, the goals come down to one thing: it’s how do we rebuild trust in the veteran community,” Santiago, only three weeks into his post, told the Joint Committee on Ways and Means at a Tuesday budget hearing in Fitchburg. “This is effectively a startup in a turnaround in some respects. The governor has invested a significant amount of financial and human resources to do just that.” 

With superintendents from veterans’ homes in Holyoke and Chelsea beside him, Santiago said they are “committed to changing the culture, rebranding the institution, to best serve our veterans.” 

Superintendent Michael Lazo from Holyoke and Robert Engell, the executive director of veterans’ homes and housing, who is acting superintendent for the Veterans’ Home in Chelsea, painted a picture of transformed institutions with the influx of funding included in Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed budget.  

The new secretariat, budgeted for $185.6 million by the governor and now separated out from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, serves about 380,000 veterans in Massachusetts and their families. The Veterans’ Home in Holyoke is in line for a slight budget increase, up to $30 million, while the Veterans’ Home in Chelsea would see a slight drop to $49 million to adjust for fewer one-time costs since the last budget. 

Along with establishing the new secretariat, a 2022 law mandates that superintendents at the state veterans’ homes be licensed nursing home administrators. This change, along with other operational adjustments under the new law, responds to a COVID-19 outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home that killed at least 76 veterans in 2020.  

A scathing report in mid-2020 described actions that were “utterly baffling from an infection-control perspective.” After the outbreak, staff reported crushingly low morale and the facilities struggled to recruit for vacant positions. The superintendent during the outbreak, Bennett Walsh, was a political appointee with no health care background. 

Lazo told lawmakers that “2023 will be a turning point for the veterans’ home.” The proposed budget, he and Engell said, will help boost staffing and allow the facilities to make “substantial progress in clinical and infection control protocols.”  

Staffing levels are up, Lazo said, through a combination of “critical” recreation director and budget director hires and contracted staff. Patient care levels are consistently above the five-star standard set by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, he said. 

“I’m not sure how you’re doing it, but that’s unheard of to see or hear staffing levels like that,” Rep. Mathew Muratore, a Plymouth Republican, said to Lazo about the Holyoke staffing. “But I’ll tell you, that equates to good care.”

As both Holyoke and Chelsea are slated for new facilities, Lazo said a consultant will conduct an  assessment to determine staff needs as the Holyoke veterans’ home moves toward its new renovated facility.  

The hearing came days after a new class action lawsuit was filed by employees at the Veterans’ Home in Holyoke, formerly known as the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home. 

In a federal complaint, employees accuse Walsh, the facility’s former superintendent, its former medical director, Dr. David Clinton, and other medical supervisors of making “a series of criminally catastrophic decisions in their mishandling of the COVID-19 virus within the Soldiers’ Home that led to the slow, agonizing, and preventable deaths of 77 veterans and the extreme sickness of scores of employees.” 

Supervisors, the plaintiffs say, initially worked to conceal the risk posed by the illness, then “engaged in a knowing pattern of lies and misrepresentations in a shocking attempt to cover up their own malfeasance.” 

Among other allegations, the suit claims that employees were denied personal protective equipment and that workers who tested positive for COVID-19 were ordered to return to work after quarantining for three days. 

The suit argues that the actions of management rise to the level of a constitutional violation, knowingly creating a danger and depriving employees of a right to bodily autonomy without due process.  

This is the second class action suit brought by employees of the facility arguing civil rights violations for their working conditions during the 2020 outbreak. Both suits targeted Walsh, Clinton, former chief nursing officer Vanessa Lauziere, and former assistant nursing manager Celeste Surreira, all of whom resigned over the course of the pandemic.  

Leonard Kesten, attorney for the employees in the recent suit, was also an attorney for the previous unsuccessful class action suit arguing that the conditions and actions in the Soldiers’ Home during the pandemic violated employees’ constitutional rights.  

A federal judge dismissed the earlier suit last October, ruling that the plaintiffs did not establish a substantive violation of protected rights. The standard, ruled US District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni, requires showing “both that the acts were so egregious as to shock the conscience and that they deprived [plaintiffs] of a protected interest in life, liberty, or property.” Mastroianni wrote that, “Employment, including public employment, is not a fundamental right.” 

At the time, Kesten told MassLive that his firm planned to explore other options after the suit was dismissed. 

This recent lawsuit adds to the pile of litigation that has arisen from veterans’ deaths in the spring of 2020, seeking compensation and criminal charges for what is characterized as fatal mismanagement of state facilities. 

The state agreed last year to pay $56 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by veterans who contracted COVID-19 and the families of veterans who died at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home. During an outbreak between March and June of 2020, scores of veterans died and others were infected with COVID-19.  

Families of veterans who died in the spring of 2020 at the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home are also suing. In a federal class action civil rights lawsuit filed in late February, the families argue that officials failed to take appropriate steps to mitigate or address unsafe conditions at the facility, leading to the deaths of at least 31 veterans. 

In September 2020, then-Attorney General Maura Healey filed criminal charges against Walsh and Clinton for elder neglect. The veterans’ deaths, the state argued, was premised on a decision made on March 27, 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, to merge two dementia housing units in the Soldier’s Home in Holyoke, leading to the deadly outbreak. 

A Hampden Superior Court judge dismissed the suit, but Healey appealed that ruling. The Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments on whether to reinstate the charges in January and is still pondering the case.