The Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center on Mission Hill, shown March 6.

Benjamin Healthcare Center in Mission Hill. The sale of the Edgar Benjamin to Allaire Health Services is expected to close Feb. 1, even as some community members have continued to raise concerns about Allaire’s suitability to take over operations.

After nearly two years, the sale of the Edgar Benjamin Healthcare Center to Allaire Health Services is expected to close by Feb. 1, according to attorneys for the receivership overseeing the Mission Hill nursing home.

“I understand we’re getting close to the end,” said Justice Christopher Belezos, who presided over the Jan. 9 status conference in Suffolk County Superior Court.

The court-appointed receivership, which has overseen operations of the facility since April 2024, is expected to terminate Feb. 9, marking the end of a protracted legal process that prevented closure of the facility.

That receivership has been headed by Roxbury attorney Joseph Feaster, since the Mission Hill nursing home’s then-administrator was forced out amid allegations of mismanagement that left staff without pay.

Feaster announced his selection of Allaire Health Services, a for-profit long-term care company based in New Jersey, in late July. He first announced in April that he was considering a sale of the facility and transfer ownership to an outside organization as a strategy to keep it operating. Allaire operates 23 facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

One lingering question is what will happen to any money left over from the sale?

According to a document filed with the court in August by Feaster, when he officially recommended Allaire take over ownership and operation of the facility, the New Jersey company proposed a bid of $6.5 million.

Much of that money will go toward paying off previous financial obligations of the facility, including a lien placed on the property in November 2024 by the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services to ensure it recouped any funds the court required it to advance to the facility through MassHealth during the receivership.

But at the Jan. 9 conference, attorneys for the receivership said they expected somewhere between $1 million and $1.5 million remaining after those payments.

Who will be responsible for the money — and what will be done with it — is still in flux.

“Who’s going to get that [money]?” Belezos said at the conference. “Who owns the building?”

Normally a board for the Edgar Benjamin nonprofit would be responsible for dealing with the residual funds and winding down the organization as ownership of the property and operations transfer to Allaire, but at the time the receivership was announced, the board was composed of three members, including the ousted former administrator Tony Francis.

With no current active members of the board, the receivership and the Attorney General’s Office, with oversight by the court, are left trying to decide who will be responsible for those funds and how they will be used.

At the status conference, Freeley said the Attorney General’s Office had proposed that Feaster seek three independent members to constitute a new board that can oversee the use of the funds and wind down the organization. That board would also be responsible for attending to existing lawsuits in which the center is involved, including a lawsuit against Francis alleging he stole and embezzled at least $3 million from the Edgar Benjamin.

Attorneys for the receivership said that Feaster had begun to search for volunteer board members but so far had little luck. Instead, they floated the idea of a new receivership that would be responsible for the dissolution of the nonprofit entity.

It was a solution Feaster said he supported — believing it would be more effective and efficient to have one person handling the issues, not a collective board that might have to hire someone to handle the administrative pieces — but one that Belezos didn’t want to endorse.

“What we don’t want is another receivership,” Belezos said at the status conference. “If we have to, we have to, but that is not an ideal solution.”

If no other solution is found, the attorney general’s office said it could petition the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to involuntarily dissolve the Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center nonprofit. If approved, the court would authorize the administration of the remaining funds to other similar charitable purposes.

As the sale marches to its conclusion, Oren Sellstrom, an attorney representing the guardians of residents who originally sued for the receivership, filed a statement with the court on Jan. 8 announcing that an agreement had been signed by Allaire at the end of October, stating the company would not unilaterally displace any current residents of the facility. Sellstrom, in his capacity representing families at the facility, has long voiced his desire to see written protections for residents throughout the sale process.

Throughout the receivership, the process has often been contentious, as Feaster and his team butted heads with various other players — with the Attorney General’s Office, which often pushed for more oversight of the process; with Delicia Mark, whom Feaster hired as the center’s administrator in May 2024 and who later raised her own allegations of mismanagement against Feaster and his executive assistant Dianne Wilkerson [Mark left her role heading the facility last year]; and most recently with the Mattapan Community Development Corporation and Kenya Hanspard, who has served as the center’s medical director.

The Mattapan CDC and Hanspard, along with others, filed a competing bid to purchase the center that Feaster ultimately rejected. They alleged in a motion to intervene in the proceedings in October that the bid process was mishandled and that a sale to Allaire could harm residents at the facility. Justice Anthony Campo, who was overseeing the case at the time, rejected their motion.

The receivership is facing new criticism by guardians of residents at the facility, who expressed frustration that the sale to Allaire, though it went through a public comment process, felt like it was treated as a “done deal,” said one guardian, who requested not to be named due to concerns of retribution against their family member who resides at the Edgar Benjamin.

Guardians also raised concerns about the suitability of Allaire to operate the Edgar Benjamin, expressing worries that it would mean a reduced quality of care for residents.

“My concern taking it from nonprofit status to for-profit status — and even just a budget line within a larger corporation — is that that’s all it becomes: How can we squeeze money out of this?” the Edgar Benjamin guardian said. “They lose sight that there are people in here, people with needs.

They lose sight that this is a historic institution.”

In other states, facilities owned by Allaire have faced complaints and violations.

In Vermont, three facilities Allaire acquired at the end of 2024 faced problems in recent months, including resident neglect, medication errors and staffing shortages, according to an October report by nonprofit news outlet VTDigger.

That article, citing a state inspection, reported one Allaire facility, St. Johnsbury Center for Living and Rehabilitation, was found to have violations at the level of “immediate jeopardy” due to neglect cases and instances of “widespread system failure.” That state inspection, from July, identified staffing shortages, a lack of systems for care planning and medication management, breakdowns in communication and an instance where the director of nursing reported having heard about an incident in which a certified nursing assistant allegedly slapped a resident across the face that was never reported to the state.

A report assembled by the Dignity Alliance of Massachusetts, a nonprofit that advocates for older adults and people with disabilities, also identified penalties levied against Allaire facilities in New Jersey for widespread staffing violations and legally mandated admissions freezes.

Facilities owned by the company have faced several civil and malpractice lawsuits in recent years.

In a statement, a representative for Allaire said the company acknowledges the reporting from VTDigger, but said the facilities they took over had been previously underperforming. According to the VTDigger report, the three owned by Allaire were part of a group of nine owned by Genesis HealthCare, a nursing home operator that faced its own concerns and settlements. The ratings those facilities received, he said, “reflect a point in time — not the pathway to improvement.”

“We are following things with The Benjamin very closely, and we are completely confident in our ability to engage with the resident community and broader market to elevate performance and patient/ resident experience within and through the facility,” he said in the statement.

Feaster, in an interview, said he stood by his recommendation of Allaire to take over operations of the facility.

“If you tell me that there’s a nursing home in this country that doesn’t get violations, or [immediate jeopardy findings] from CMS and all of them, I want to find that nursing home operation,” he said.

Since November, Alex Ringkamp, an interim administrator affiliated with Allaire, has been running the facility.

During that time, a second guardian of a resident at the Edgar Benjamin alleged interactions with leadership at the facility had turned hostile. The guardian said they were told they should feel lucky their family member was at the facility and that if they didn’t like how things were being run, they should leave.

The first guardian said that in conversations with staff she had heard that the facility’s leadership was discussing intentionally limiting the amount of some supplies like incontinence pads.

But, with declining openings in nursing home beds, and few that have a reputation for cultural competency — the Edgar Benjamin was first opened to serve Black residents in the 1920s when they might have been shut out of other long-term care facilities — the guardians who spoke with the Banner said leaving is neither easy nor appealing.

“That’s one of the reasons why this home exists, to have something in our community,” the first guardian said. “It is the last African American-owned and operated home in New England — not just Boston or Massachusetts, but New England.”

With the sale set to close in less than a month, the guardians said they aren’t fighting to stop the transfer, but rather to keep the Edgar Benjamin’s new owners accountable.

“This is about dignity for vulnerable elders,” the second guardian said.