The Addison Pointe
Health & Rehabilitation Center, 780 Dickinson Road, is comfortably in
compliance with its hiring commitments, one of the conditions of a 10-year
tax abatement which the Chesterton Town Council grated in 2006.
At a meeting
Tuesday afternoon of the Tax Abatement Advisory Committee, attorney Kyle
Persinger--representing the facility’s new owner, Health Care Properties
LLC--reported that 160 hires were made in 2015 and that those 160 employees
earned salary and wages totaling $3.765 million.
As of Friday,
Persinger added, fully 167 were employed at Addison Pointe, with the
expectation that another three hires would be made in the near future, and
that those 170 “will be the highest number of employees the facility has
ever had.”
In any case, last
year’s 160 hires exceed by 40--that is, by 25 percent--the 120 which the
previous owner, Long Term Care Investments II (LTCI), had committed to
employing when it originally applied for the tax abatement. And the
$3.765-million payroll exceeds by $565,000--by 18 percent--the $3.2 million
payroll which LTCI had similarly committed to making.
LTCI made another
commitment as well in 2006: namely, giving Chesterton residents preferential
consideration when making hiring decisions, as much as is legal and
practical.
Last year Addison
Pointe received a total of 397 applications, 60 of them from persons with
Chesterton mailing addresses; of those, 160 applicants were hired, 28 of
them--or 18 percent--persons with Chesterton mailing addresses. For the
record, in 2014 23 percent of successful job applicants at Addison Pointe
were persons with Chesterton mailing addresses.
“If a
non-Chesterton applicant was hired over a Chesterton applicant, it was due
to qualifications and experience,” Persinger said.
Committee Member
Dane Lafata did have this question for Persinger: how do you know a person
is an actual Town of Chesterton resident and not someone who lives in an
unincorporated township but has a Chesterton mailing address?
Persinger’s
response: Addison Pointe administrators don’t in fact know.
Addison Pointe’s
acting administrator, Harriett Wallace, did note that Addison Pointe has, at
the moment, a fairly substantial annualized turnover rate of 24 percent.
But, she noted. That turnover rate is a “pretty standard” one for the
industry.
Town Attorney Chuck
Lukmann, for his part, told the committee that Addison Pointe is in
“substantial compliance” with its commitments. Its submission to the town
for renewal of the tax abatement is missing information, however, and must
be completed before the Town Council can vote to renew. The committee did
vote unanimously to find Addison Pointe in substantial compliance contingent
on its completing that submission.
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