The board of the State University of New York voted on Tuesday, for the second time in several weeks, to close Long Island College Hospital, which was taken over by the university system two years ago, and which university officials say is losing $1 million a week.
The board was forced to hold another vote by a state court decision last week that found that the board had violated the state’s Open Meetings Law by retreating into a private session before the first vote, in February. Union workers and doctors who are fighting the closing of the hospital in Brooklyn had brought the lawsuit challenging the validity of that vote.
SUNY will now resubmit its closing plan for LICH, as the hospital is called, to the State Health Department, which has the authority to make the final decision.
Nurses who attended the vote, which was taken at a regularly scheduled board meeting at SUNY Purchase, said they would continue to fight the closing. “They are not the last word,” Julie Semente, an intensive care nurse, said after the vote. She said the nurses would appeal to the governor and the Health Department.
In a statement, SUNY said the closing was necessary to stabilize the finances of LICH’s parent organization, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and to preserve its 8,000 jobs and Brooklyn’s only medical school.