A big thank you to Custer Cares
If you missed last week’s edition of the Custer County Chronicle, you missed some of the biggest and most positive news we have had on these pages in some time: A nursing home is coming back to Custer, thanks to the hard work of many dedicated inviduals in town.
It was late 2021 when Monument Health announced it was going to close the nursing home; it sent a shockwave through the community. It was hard to fathom Custer without a nursing home—after all, this is a retirement community and a nursing home is an essential part of pretty much any thriving town, let alone a town with a “chronlogically advanced” (a phrase we borrowed from Custer Cares member Monica McGowan) population such as Custer’s. It’s absolutely essential we have a nursing home here.
We are so pleased that Mayor Bob Brown didn’t take the announcement of the nursing home lying down. He immediately went to work (as did other concerned members of the community) to see what could be done to have Monument Health keep the nursing home open, or, in the alternative, have a new nursing home open. It wasn’t an easy task, but most things that are worthwhile aren’t very easy. Brown enlisted some of Custer’s best and brightest to help with the task of bringing a nursing home back to Custer. If we were starting any task force with something important to tackle, we couldn’t think of two better people to tap with such a responsibility than Mike Tennyson and Janet Boyer. How many people in town have more business savvy than those two? How many people in town care more about Custer than those two? As Bum Phillips once said, I don’t know if they are in a class by themselves, but when that class gets together, it doesn’t take long to call the roll.
So, we thank them, and we thank Mayor Brown. We thank all of the other members of Custer Cares and anyone who had a hand in bringing us back a much-needed asset to town. We are talking to McGowan, Rick Wheeler, former Mayor Gary Lipp, Marci O’Connell, Dr. Joy Falkenburg, Dr. Cleve Trimble, and anyone else who assisted. If you don’t see your name here and you had a hand in this, thank you.
Also, thank you to Monument Health. It sounds like negotiations occasionally went a little sideways, but by agreeing to turn over the building and working with Custer Cares to bring the town a nursing home, you have greatly assisted the town that we know you all love. It’s not lost on us that at the end of the day, Monument Health had a hand in this as well.
The work is not done. We as a community must now volunteer and back the nursing home in every way we can. If it fails then we can say we did the best we could. The way to keep it from failing is to throw all our support behind it. We have no doubt this community will do just that.