LAUREL — Although it took 74-year-old Linda Lund some time to come around to Hillcrest Care Center and Assisted Living, she eventually insisted it was home.

Lund, who has dementia, became attached to the city-owned nursing home and the people in it after adjusting, said her daughter Brenda Anderson.

Lund grew up in Laurel, a northeast Nebraska town of nearly 1,000 people, and knew many of the Hillcrest residents who occupied its 36 beds. When going on trips outside the home, she would insist on being back by 6 p.m., her daughter said.

The rural nursing home’s closure in April, one of 17 in the state in the last four years, forced Lund to move to a nearby facility in a different town, again starting the process of acclimating to a new environment — this time around strangers.

Months later, she still mainly stays in her room.

“We’re back to square one again trying to get her motivated,” Anderson said.

Lund and other former Hillcrest residents became collateral damage of months of conflict between the former staff and the city. At the heart of it: the facility’s former administrator, Megan Wieck.

The Flatwater Free Press spoke with five former Hillcrest employees and three members of the former advisory board. They allege Wieck mismanaged Hillcrest’s finances and created a toxic environment that triggered mass resignations before the closure.

In October, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office filed a complaint seeking disciplinary action against Wieck. It says, among other claims, that Wieck failed to investigate a case of alleged abuse at Hillcrest and that she failed to properly manage a now-shuttered care center in Ponca. 

Wieck declined to comment to the Flatwater Free Press.

City leaders have said they went to great lengths to stave off Hillcrest’s closure, taking out multiple lines of credit to keep it afloat. The mass departure of staff members early in the year forced the city’s hand, they said.

“Through the whole process, every morning we got up and the primary purpose was to do what we could for the residents, to have the care be the best it could be,” said Laurel Mayor Keith Knudsen during a brief interview following a City Council meeting in August.

But some former staff members say the city, particularly Knudsen, failed to provide proper oversight and listen to concerns about Wieck.

“This man and this woman didn’t care, and made it clear that they didn’t care, and completely destroyed it,” said Wendy Krie, a former restorative therapy nurse at Hillcrest.

“Deceit and awfulness”

Wieck started managing Hillcrest on a part-time basis in June 2022. At the time, she also worked part time at Elms Health Care Center, an unaffiliated nursing home roughly 65 miles away in Ponca. She continued working at Elms until June 2023. It closed five months later.

In 2024, Krie said she examined documents submitted to the state after Hillcrest families asked about rising monthly costs.

Krie alleges Wieck, without the appropriate qualifications, altered residents’ nutritional documents. She then had nurses sign them, which led to new diagnoses from doctors, such as signs of malnutrition, and ultimately raised the residents’ care costs.

Katie Kvols, Hillcrest’s former director of nursing, said that eventually, nurses stopped signing for Wieck after Kvols and Krie informed them of Wieck’s alleged alterations. When Wieck caught on that they knew, she stopped adjusting the documents, Kvols said.

“They were afraid of saying no to (Wieck), because then you had a target on your back,” Kvols said of Hillcrest’s nurses, “and you didn’t want a target on your back, because then she made your life a living hell.”

The City Council and the mayor ignored staff’s attempts to tell them what Wieck was doing, Kvols said.

The nutritional documents were part of larger assessments submitted to the state through MDS Solutions, a Tennessee-based company Wieck hired after starting at Hillcrest. Krie said that work previously had been among her responsibilities.

MDS Solutions was one of several ways that Wieck wasted money, former staff members told Flatwater. According to Hillcrest’s cost reports, the city paid about $3,000 to $5,000 each month to the company.

Dan Kuhlman, Laurel’s city administrator and economic development coordinator, said Hillcrest hired MDS Solutions because reports were being submitted incorrectly. However, the problems persisted even after bringing in MDS, Kuhlman said.

Financial documents dating back to 2023 show Hillcrest’s money woes continued to worsen. 

Marsha Meier, the former business office manager, said Wieck started directing her to write checks to vendors for amounts the nursing home didn’t have in its bank account, hoping that they would have enough money by the time the vendor cashed the check.

“That is not good business practice,” Meier said. “That is just deceit and awfulness.”

In 2023, roughly a year after Wieck’s hiring, concerned staff members approached members of the center’s advisory board, an appointed body meant to advise Wieck and the City Council. Advisory board members suggested the employees bring their concerns to a board meeting — meetings that Wieck attended. Many chose not to for fear of retaliation, one board member told Flatwater. 

About a year later, the City Council unanimously voted to dissolve Hillcrest’s advisory board. Kuhlman said this was to eliminate the middleman in financial updates.

Multiple former staff members told Flatwater they believe the council eliminated the board because it started to question Wieck’s handling of Hillcrest’s finances. 

“It seemed like anything that Megan wanted, Keith (the mayor) would do, or let her do,” said Deanna McCoy, a former medication aide at Hillcrest.

Meanwhile, Wieck’s management was contributing to a hostile environment in Hillcrest, former staff members allege. Wieck had hired several staff members from the Ponca center after it closed in 2023. According to former employees, she threatened to fire any Hillcrest staffers who disrespected their new co-workers. 

Former staff members also allege Wieck failed to follow internal policies, such as guidelines for holiday pay. The City Council approved a policy in 2024 adding two paid holidays for permanent Hillcrest employees. But Wieck told the employees that only upper-level management would receive paid holidays.

In April, the Nebraska Department of Labor determined that the City of Laurel had to pay eight Hillcrest employees because the nursing home had shorted them on holiday pay. Danita Hanson, one of the eight, said multiple others refused to file wage complaints for fear of retaliation from Wieck.

Everything “snowballed”

By December 2024, staff members grew so concerned with the state of Hillcrest’s finances and what they viewed as inaction by the city that they posted flyers urging people to save the home. They included a financial report showing the center was nearly $430,000 in debt.

At the January City Council meeting, the mayor denounced their claim, saying the documents provided only half the picture. Hillcrest was not in imminent danger of closing, Knudsen said.

In analyzing financial documents, the Flatwater Free Press found that Hillcrest’s expenses outpaced its revenue for most of 2023 and almost the entirety of 2024.

Also in January, the council renewed a $500,000 line of credit — essentially a loan — for Hillcrest’s payroll, one of at least three lines of credit the city received via Security Bank. Knudsen is the president of Security Bank.

Some staff and community members questioned whether Knudsen’s dual roles posed a conflict of interest. 

“(Wieck) was making bad financial decisions, continuing to drive the facility into debt,” Meier said. “And the mayor slash president of Security Bank continued to give her money and more money without holding her accountable.”

After briefly speaking with a Flatwater reporter following an August City Council meeting, Knudsen did not respond to eight emails and eight phone calls requesting further comment.

Kuhlman said the city’s mayor had been involved in the processing and signed paperwork on behalf of the city until January, when, according to City Council meeting minutes, the council president took over.

Knudsen didn’t vote with the council to approve any lines of credit, except once in 2023 when there otherwise wouldn’t have been enough council members for a quorum.

Gavin Geis, executive director of Common Cause Nebraska, said this case doesn’t fit the legal definition of a conflict of interest set out in Nebraska law. However, public distrust can still arise if a community sees an elected official’s involvement in something as problematic or not transparent, he said.

Feeling ignored in January, staff then circulated an informal petition to remove Wieck, gathering more than 200 signatures. When it failed to spur action, resignations flooded in.

In March, Wieck resigned as the administrator, a move the city said was mutually agreed upon.

Days earlier, the City Council unanimously voted to close Hillcrest, the town’s second-largest employer, giving staff 60 days to move all residents out.

The city’s private auditors had warned of the nursing home’s financial decline since 2022, Kuhlman said, but the public pressure and staff resignations that occurred after January “snowballed” and ultimately led to its downfall.

“It was not on anybody’s mind that the place was going to close in three months,” Kuhlman said of the statements made at the beginning of the year.

By April, the last resident had been moved out.

Disciplinary action

In October, the Nebraska attorney general filed a petition for disciplinary action against Wieck. Most of the allegations stem from Wieck’s two years running Elms Health Care Center in Ponca. 

According to the petition, Wieck hired a person with no financial management experience to serve as the business manager at Elms. Wieck agreed to train the employee, but never did. In the case of one patient, this resulted in more than $35,848 in lost revenue because the business manager did not bill Medicare and Medicaid. 

Vendors went unpaid, resulting in trash removal and other services being cut off. Elms faced $34,890 in penalties for failing to pay federal unemployment insurance taxes, according to the petition.

Wieck charged $28,000 to the owner’s credit card for facility purchases and failed to pay off the balance, according to the petition. She also allegedly allowed staff to max out the business credit card. 

When she resigned from Elms, Wieck allegedly paid herself for two years’ worth of paid time off, totaling $6,540, despite having taken “substantial time off while receiving her full salary,” according to the petition.

Along with documenting the incident at Hillcrest where Wieck failed to properly pay employees’ holiday pay, the petition asserts Wieck learned a resident was allegedly abused by an employee and failed to investigate or report it.

The allegation was detailed in a January report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A nursing assistant allegedly held a washcloth over a resident’s mouth in August 2024. The resident had severely impaired cognitive skills and required extensive assistance with basic functions, according to the report. 

Wieck and others told HHS they learned of the incident in January but never reported it. 

The petition does not specify what disciplinary actions the state is seeking for the “gross incompetence” and “unprofessional conduct” alleged in the document. A spokeswoman with the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office declined to comment.

Even under better circumstances, rural nursing homes in Nebraska have faced mounting challenges in recent years. Sixteen other rural Nebraska nursing homes have closed in the last four years, according to data published by the Nebraska Health Care Association. 

Jalene Carpenter, the president of the association, attributed these closures to a declining workforce, shrinking nursing home populations, chronic underfunding and unrealistic federal requirements.

“It is incredibly difficult to operate a nursing home with all of the regulations in a rural setting, because you’re having to meet what people in Baltimore, Maryland, think … is appropriate when they don’t understand what it means to take care of 28 people,” Carpenter said.

Currently, the City of Laurel owes Security Bank more than $1 million for the lines of credit. Kuhlman said the city is hopeful future IRS tax credits will be enough to pay off the smallest of them.

As of November, the City Council has the facility listed for sale for about $600,000. It plans to sell equipment and personal property through an auction in December. Any proceeds from the sale of the building and equipment will go toward unpaid bills, which totaled over $60,000 as of late September, as well as outstanding lines of credit.

If the sale doesn’t cover the remaining balance of the loans, the city will “need to look into some longer-term payback arrangements,” Kuhlman said in an email.

Wieck has an administrative hearing scheduled Dec. 8 to determine if the state will take disciplinary action against her.

Brenda Anderson can no longer pop in to visit her mom on her way home from work. The new, more expensive facility where her mom now lives is about 12 miles north of Laurel. Her mom isn’t concerned anymore about rushing back from trips outside her new home.

“(I’m) sad she doesn’t say, ‘I better get home now, they will be worried about me,’” Anderson said.