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If you read their surveys, they say they need access to credit. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris wants to give small businesses a deduction.

by Jake Pearson

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Update, Sept. 16, 2024: Judith Zbiegniewicz said she received a series of checks after this story was published. One was from New York Guardianship Services, which paid her $5,400 in compliance with the court order mentioned in this article. Zbiegniewicz said the company’s check was dated Aug. 30, the same day that ProPublica reached out to NYGS for comment. Separately, Carrington Mortgage Services paid Zbiegniewicz $5,000 and her husband $2,500 to honor a prior housing court settlement, as per the same court order. The lender sent the checks late last week, following ProPublica’s inquiries.

A New York judge has ordered one of the city’s most prominent guardianship companies to return thousands of dollars to an elderly woman for the court-mandated care and oversight it failed to provide her.

Supreme Court Justice Lee Mayersohn wrote in an Aug. 8 decision that the company, New York Guardianship Services, billed Judith Zbiegniewicz monthly but provided “minimal services, if any” for years, including at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

During that time, Zbiegniewicz, who was living under guardianship for depression and anxiety, said she and her husband spent a night on the streets, moved into a city shelter and finally found affordable housing on their own.

Zbiegniewicz and her decade-long journey through the state’s broken guardianship system were the subject of a ProPublica investigation earlier this year. The reporting showed how that system, which is plagued by chronic delays, lax regulation and minimal oversight, has failed to protect thousands of aging and sick New Yorkers who judges have declared incapable of managing their own affairs.

The people most affected are poor wards like Zbiegniewicz who have no friends or family willing to look after them — a group dubbed “the unbefriended” in industry parlance. To care for this group, the city relies on a network of nonprofits. New York Guardianship Services represented itself as one such group and was assigned by the court to be Zbiegniewicz’s guardian.

Despite its representations, NYGS, which serves hundreds of wards, is not actually registered as a nonprofit with state and federal authorities, ProPublica found.

For roughly a decade, the company paid itself from Zbiegniewicz’s bank account, even as she complained about deteriorating living conditions. The problems that she described — living with bedbugs, rats and no heat — persisted for years, and NYGS did little or nothing to fix them while it collected monthly stipends from her limited funds. She said that she eventually tried to reach Mayersohn to flag the neglect and hold NYGS accountable but that her attempts were unsuccessful. The judge’s secretary, she said, simply referred her calls back to the guardianship company.

That changed in June though, after Zbiegniewicz attended a hearing to formally dispute NYGS’ accounting — protests she had previously articulated in a letter to the judge. During a court appearance, she complained to Mayersohn about her time as a ward of NYGS. She said she told him that there was “no excuse for what they put me through.”

Mayersohn’s decision, informed by that hearing, requires the company to return $5,400 to Zbiegniewicz for some of the fees it took between January 2019 and July 2022, a stretch in which she effectively lived on her own outside the guardianship.

The order separately requires the bank that owned the rat-and-bedbug-infested Queens home where NYGS placed Zbiegniewicz to honor a prior housing court settlement, which it has yet to pay. Under the deal, the bank owes Zbiegniewicz $5,000. If it doesn’t pay, she can seek to reclaim the money in court, though Zbiegniewicz said she was skeptical that the effort and cost of doing so would be worth it. An attorney for the bank didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

In an interview, Zbiegniewicz said that she was pleased with the ruling, but that she was more happy that Mayersohn finally heard directly from her. She also said that she wanted NYGS to be held to account for its actions.

“I got some kind of justice, but the justice would be if they would be taken out of guardianships completely because they do not do anything for the people,” she said.

As part of its reporting, ProPublica identified more than a dozen cases like Zbiegniewicz’s in which NYGS failed to meet the needs of those entrusted to its care. In one case, a woman who’d had two strokes was placed in a nursing home where she was left to sit in soiled diapers, a family member said. In another case, the company continued to collect payments for a man’s care even after he left the country and later died.

Brothers Sam and David Blau, who run NYGS, and a lawyer for the group did not respond to an email seeking comment on the judge’s decision. In response to ProPublica’s previous reporting, Sam Blau, the group’s chief financial officer, said that “we are accountable to the Court” and emphasized that the group’s financial paperwork was scrutinized by examiners who had the power to raise issues. He called the reporting “misguided, without full and proper context, filled with omissions and less than accurate information” but wouldn’t specify what his concerns were when asked. He declined to comment on any specific cases.

Zbiegniewicz credited ProPublica’s investigation for the judge’s action in her case — an uncommon occurrence in New York’s troubled guardianship system. But she also noted it took years of sustained protest on her part, a level of persistence that many ailing and elderly New Yorkers in guardianship cannot manage.

“I’ve done what I could, I feel good about it, the judge heard, you wrote things,” she said. “Maybe somebody will see and maybe somewhere, down the line, somebody will do something about it.”

A state supreme court decision could boil down to an all-or-nothing gambit.

With its beautiful Stupp fountain, majestic marble columns, and iconic STL letters, St. Louisans today think of the Missouri History Museum’s North Lawn as a place for parties, picnics, and photo ops. While the entrance itself has always been an attractive and welcoming space, the area surrounding it has undergone significant changes and upgrades since …

Continue reading "Making a Grand Entrance: The Missouri History Museum’s North Lawn"

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — A 14-year-old student opened fire at a Georgia high school and killed four people on Wednesday, authorities said, sending students scrambling for shelter in their classrooms — and eventually to the football stadium — as officers swarmed the campus and parents raced to find out if their children were safe. The [...]

John Angel of Granite City, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

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The 10th biannual exhibition curated from artists within 200 miles. Opening May 7th and on display through October, the 10th Biannual will feature 32 artists and 41 works from a […]

The post 10th Biannual Exhibit appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

Return to a time when steamboats ruled the river. The one-hour narrated riverfront cruise aboard the Riverboats at the Gateway Arch explores the history of downtown St. Louis, including the […]

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

St. Louis police said in an update that the 4-year-old girl, who was a twin, was shot by one of her siblings.

Neighbors in Crestwood are calling on St. Louis County Animal Care & Control to do more after video surfaced of a dog left in unsafe conditions. It happened last Thursday, on a day when temperatures soared into the upper 90s.

MACOMB, Ill. (WMBD) -- Two police officers were injured after a shooting near Normal and Calhoun Streets in Macomb on Wednesday. According to information released by the Macomb Police Department, two officers are in the hospital in "critical but stable condition." The Macomb Police Chief said the officers were awake and talking. The officers were [...]

Golf was much more than a game Wednesday in Sunset Hills. A tournament honoring a local police officer drew a sold-out crowd and raised tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships.

Techdirt has been reporting on the rotten state of academic publishing for more than ten years. Abuses include publishers willing to publish anything for a fee, and the sale of nonsense papers so that they can be used to bulk up an academic’s CV. But the world moves on, and Nature has a report about […]

Crawford Bryant was number 5 on the soccer team but is number 1 in the hearts of community members across Columbia. 

I see that AH Datalytics has published the inaugural version of their Real-Time Crime Index, which provides rough estimates of crime within a couple of months of it happening. This contrasts with the FBI, which takes about six months to provide quarterly estimates and nearly a year to provide final annual figures. What's more, the ...continue reading "Why did murder spike in the summer of 2020?"

A suspected gang member is charged after allegedly stealing more than $94,000 in a crime trend called "bank jugging." 

A six-second social media post Tuesday alleged daycare workers were fighting outside while toddlers sat on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

The Dome at America’s Center saw new upgrades that can’t be missed.

SPRINGFIELD - Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced the launch of the Lifesaving Education and Awareness on Donation (LEAD) program, enabling high school students to serve as “ambassadors” for the Illinois Organ and Tissue Donor Program. As part of the program, the office is partnering with the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to give students the opportunity to gain community service hours by participating. The program comes amid a disturbing decline among young people – ages 16 to 21 years old – signing up to become organ and tissue donors when they receive their first driver’s license. Illinois has experienced a 38 percent decrease in the number of new organ donor registrants ages 16 to 21 during the past 10 years, marking a decade-low 32,032 new registrants in 2023. This decrease also follows legislation passed in 2018 that allowed for 16- and 17-year-olds to register, increasing the pool of potential donors. “Our

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