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An aerial view of The Commons showing the current facility (red outline) and the 2013 plan for the assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing facility (blue outline). The new building will be attached to the existing main building.

By Alice Waugh

A new $34 million health care facility at The Commons in Lincoln is under construction and is slated to be ready for occupancy in less than a year, according to executive director Chris Golen.

The Commons, formerly known as The Groves until its bankruptcy sale to Benchmark Senior Living in 2013, currently has 168 units for independent living. The health care facility broke ground in July and will consist of 40 units of assisted living, 24 units (10 of them private) for memory care and 26 units (including 20 private) for skilled nursing, Golen said at Council on Aging session on December 5.

The new section, which will be ready in November 2015, is “much bigger than The Commons itself would need” for transitions by its current residents, Golen said, adding that he expected to draw people from Lincoln and surrounding towns who had not purchased an independent living unit.

Eventually, about 70 percent of the new building’s occupants will be people from the wider community, he said. Those people must pay a nonrefundable entrance fee of $7,000. Assisted living units start at $5,500 a month and memory care will range from $6,500 to $11,000 a month; skilled nursing rates for those who are not already residents at The Commons have not yet been set, he said.

For independent living units, residents now pay an entrance fee of anywhere from $349,000 to $899,000 depending on the size of the unit, with another $49,000 for a spouse or other second occupant, Golen said. Ninety percent of that fee is refunded when the owner moves or passes away. Owners also pay a monthly service fee of $3,700 to $6,900 plus another $1,400 for a second occupant.

Residents will not see their monthly fee go up (except for across-the-board annual hikes) if they or their spouse needs to move to one of the higher levels of care, even if the healthier spouse stays in the original unit. This year’s monthly service fee increase for all residents was 4.5 percent, he said.

The Groves was unable to attract enough independent living residents to make it economically viable largely due to the lack of a “continuum of care,” Benchmark said when it applied to the Planning Board for the health-care expansion (see the Lincoln Squirrel, March 4, 2013). The Commons is now about 50 percent occupied, Golen said. Four of the cottages were sold this year, but none had sold in the previous 18 to 24 months, “so they’re making a big comeback,” he said. The average age of residents is now about 82, with an average entry age of 75, he added.

One attendee asked how rates at The Commons compare to those of Newbury Court, a nonprofit independent living community with associated memory care and skilled nursing facilities next to Emerson Hospital in Concord. Golen replied that while Newbury Court’s entrance price and fees are initially lower than those of The Commons, which is a Type A life care facility, it’s a Type C life care facility, meaning essentially fee for service whereby residents pay the market rate for higher-level care.

“Everyone uses the term life care, but they’re not all the same. Type A is very much like an insurance policy” with much more predictable long-term costs, Golen said.

Asked what would happen if a resident ran out of money to pay the monthly service fee, Golen said he or she could draw from their entrance fee. “I can’t morally or ethically say” that someone would be forced to leave even if they exhausted all their resources, he added.

The Route 2 entrance to The Commons closed several weeks ago due to highway construction, although deliveries of construction materials for the health-care facility continue to use that entrance, overseen by private-duty police officers hired by The Commons, Golen said. Residents and visitors should use the entrance at 222 Sandy Pond Rd. Once the highway project is complete, a new service road will allow cars leaving The Commons to get onto Route 2 going in either direction.

Acknowledging the loss of trees that screened The Commons from Route 2, Golen said the facility would do “significant landscaping” once highway construction is complete, “but we can only go so high” with new plantings where mature trees once stood, he said. The state Department of Transportation will not build a sound barrier, though “we are aggressively negotiating with the state” for some other type of barrier, he added.