About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 20, 2024)
LOCAL/STATE The Times, Gainesville, Georgia I gainesvilletimes.com Tuesday, February 20, 2024 3A Hall County employee hired as Barrow County manager BY BRIAN WELLMEIER bwellmeier@gainesvilletimes.com Longtime Hall County employee Srikanth Yamala has been hired as the latest manager of Barrow Coun ty's government. Barrow County com missioners unanimously approvedYamala's appoint ment Friday, Feb. 16. Yamala, 44, has served in a number of planning roles in his 19 years with Hall County's govern ment before his most recent title as director of community development and infrastructure. He is expected to step into the new position March 11. He will be paid a yearly salary of $198,000. “Srikanth brings a wealth of leadership qualities, and his deep knowledge of addressing growth and infrastructure needs through collaboration makes him an exceptional choice to lead our govern ment,'' Barrow County Commission Chair Pat Graham said. “The board is excited about his cali ber and is looking forward to working with him to achieve greater success for Barrow County." Yamala will replace former county manager Kevin Little, who after almost two years left Barrow County before an extensive search began last November. Yamala holds a master's degree in community and regional planning from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln and a bachelor's degree in architecture from Andhra Univer sity in India. He is a member of the American Planning Association, American Public Works Associa tion and is a 2018 graduate of Lead ership Georgia. “It is an honor to serve the Bar- row County community in this role,” Yamala said following the announcement. “I look forward to meeting the citizens, partnering with the municipalities, supporting constitutional officers and working with dedicated county staff to carry out the board's vision.” A replacement for Yamala has not yet been named, according to Hall County officials, and will be decided at a later time. Yamala John Bazemore Associated Press Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife former First Lady Rosalynn Carter sit together during a reception to celebrate their 75th anniversary Saturday, July 10, 2021, in Plains, Ga. Advocates hope Jimmy Carter’s hospice care drives awareness BY BILL BARROW Associated Press ATLANTA — Since Jimmy Carter entered hospice care at his home in south Georgia one year ago, the former U.S. president has cel ebrated his 99th birthday, enjoyed tributes to his legacy and lost his wife of 77 years. Rosalynn Carter, who died in November, about six months after the Carter family disclosed her dementia diagnosis, lived only a few days under hospice supervision, with her frail husband at her bedside. Experts on end-of-life care say the Carters' different paths show the range of an oft-misunderstood service. Those advocates commend the Carter family for demonstrating the realities of aging, dementia and death. They express hope that the attention spurs more Americans to seek out services intended to help patients and families in the latter stages of life. “It's been massive to have the Carters be so public,” said Angela Novas, chief medical officer for the Hospice Foundation of America, based in Washington. “It has shed hospice in a new light, and it's raised questions” for people to learn more. The Carter family released a state ment ahead of Sunday, the one-year anniversary of their announcement that the 39th president would forgo future hospital stays and enter end- of-life care at home in Plains. “President Carter continues to be at home with his family,” the state ment said. “The family is pleased that his decision last year to enter hospice care has sparked so many family discussions across the coun try on an important subject.” To be clear, the family has not confirmed whether Jimmy Carter remains in hospice care or has been discharged, as sometimes happens when even a frail patient's health stabilizes. Here is a look at hospice and the Carters' circumstances: Mollie Gurian is vice president of Leading Age, a national network of more than 5,000 nonprofit elder- care agencies. She described hospice as “holistic care... for someone who is trying to live the end of their life as fully as possible” but no longer seeks a cure for a terminal condition. Hospice offers multiple prac titioners for each patient: nurses, physicians and social-service pro fessionals like chaplains and secular grief counselors. Home hospice fea tures in-home visits but not round- the-clock or even full-shift care. Initial eligibility requires a phy sician's certification of a terminal condition, with the expectation that a person will not live longer than six months; there are also disease-spe cific parameters. For-profit businesses or nonprofit agencies typically provide the care and employ the providers. Medicare pays those agencies a per-day rate for each patient. There are four lev els of care and daily rates. The con cept was developed after World War n and has been part of the Medicare program since the early 1980s. Pri vate insurance plans also typically cover hospice. In 2021, 1.7 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in hospice at a taxpayer cost of $23.1 billion, according to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Almost half of Medicare patients who died that year did so under hospice care. Hospice can elicit images of “someone doped up and bedridden,” but it is not ‘just providing enough morphine to make it through the end,” Gurian said. Indeed, patients give up curative treatments and many medicines. Cancer patients no longer receive radiation or chemotherapy. Those with late-stage Alzheimer's, Par kinson's or another degenerative neurological disease typically ditch cholesterol and blood-pressure med ication — and eventually drugs that regulate their acute condition. But Novas and Gurian said treat ment is case-by-case. Some agencies might allow someone with end-stage kidney disease to get dialysis or take regulatory medication. They sim ply have to absorb the cost, because Medicare almost certainly does not pay separately for those treatments. Further, hospice does not neces sarily mean forgoing treatments for certain complications that threaten comfort: antibiotics for a urinary tract infection or infected bed sores, for example. That said, patients or families may forgo such treatments, especially in cases of end-stage neu rological disease. Chip Carter, one of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's four children, confirmed to The Washington Post that his mother was suffering from a severe urinary tract infection at the time of her hospice admission and death. In those cases, Novas explained, patients are administered pain management drugs. In 2021, the average stay of hos pice patients who died was 92 days, MedPAC calculated. The median was 17 days — about two weeks longer than the time between when the Carters' announced the former first lady had entered hospice and when she died. About 10% of enrollees who die in hospice care stayed more than 264 days. Extended cases drive a major ity of costs. In 2021, $13.6 billion of the overall $23 billion paid was for stays exceeding 180 days before death. Of that, $5 billion was for stays longer than a year. Patients are sometimes discharged from hospice if their condition stabi lizes, especially if they have reached the six-month mark in the program. In 2021, 17.2% of the patients were discharged. The MedPAC report to Congress noted that for-profit agen cies have higher average length of stays than nonprofits and added that living patients' discharge rates raise questions about admission standards. Novas offered explanations. She said hospice has seen an uptick in patients with dementia, conditions in which “a patient can wax and wane for months or even years.” Another factor — one she said could explain Jimmy Carter's endurance — is sheer grit. “We cannot measure the human spirit,” she said. With many condi tions, “somebody who wants to be here is going to stick around for a while.” Flowery Branch meetings are now on city’s website Flowery Branch City Council meetings now can be viewed on the city's website the day after they are held. A new software program has enabled the service, with the council's last meeting on Thursday, Feb. 15, being the first one that was fully recorded. The meeting could be viewed as early as the next day, Friday, Feb. 16. Viewers just need to click on “Available Archives” on the “Agendas & Minutes” page and then click “video” on the meeting they want to view. An agenda with links to items under consideration is fixed next to the video. Meetings also can be viewed as they happen on the city's app or YouTube, City Clerk Shelia Cooper said. “We are con sidering Facebook live as well for the future,” she said. Jeff Gill Jeff Gill The Times Here’s a screen shot of the online playback of a Flowery Branch City Council meeting. Swindling local ‘psychic healer’ accepts plea deal BY BEN ANDERSON banderson@gainesvilletimes.com A Braselton man accused of swindling people out of more than $85,000 as a “psychic healer” accepted a plea deal Monday, Feb. 19. Jackson William Ramirez-Reyes pleaded guilty to three counts of felony theft by deception and faced a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Superior Court Judge Lindsey Burton sentenced Ramirez-Reyes to 15 years of probation, forbade him from earning money as a psychic healer and ordered him to pay back a total of $28,000 — $20,000 to one victim and $4,000 each to two others. Under the terms of the plea deal, Ramirez-Reyes will be eligible for release from his probation after three years if he demonstrates good behavior. District Attorney Lee Darragh said in a statement that Ramirez- Reyes “will be monitored closely to ensure he lives up to the restitu tion ordered within the 90 day period, and that during his probation that he complies with all the conditions of his probation scrupulously. ... The sentence was appropriate considering the need to get the vic tims some significant restitution for his criminal fraud upon them.” Ramirez-Reyes was accused of telling people that they or their family members would die from cancer or in a car wreck or be killed by police if they did not pay him for his services. One Hispanic couple said they emptied their life savings, paying Ramirez-Reyes more than $70,000. They said they performed ritu als in which they called out to the spirits of dead relatives and drank copious amounts of mineral water, eventually regurgitating the water as a way of exorcizing demons or evil spirits. “They were so intimidated and fearful that... they would continu ously go back and get all the money that they had in the bank,” a fam ily interpreter previously told The Times. Ramirez-Reyes's defense attorney, Arturo Corso, said his client was pleased with the outcome. “Overall, he's glad it's over,” Corso said in an interview. “He's glad that he didn't go to jail. He's glad to be able to give these people back some of their money.” “It was a very scary and difficult process to go through,” Corso said. “He didn't know how a jury might look at the case. The jury might think, ‘Well, those people got what they paid for or they deserve what they get.' Or you can have a jury that says, ‘Well, you know, we don't like that and we're going to punish him by finding him guilty.' So it's always better, in my opinion, to have a resolution that you can control rather than the uncertainty of going to a jury trial and you don't know what's going to happen.” Corso said his client has found a job working for a company that cleans commercial trucks. “He's already got a job lined up,” he said. “Obviously, not in the spiritual advisor or healing area.” Scott Rogers The Times Jackson Ramirez-Reyes attends a plea-hearing, Feb. 7. FROM 1A Martinez motions that Juan Martinez appeared to have some “lim ited intellectual functioning,” according to court documents. According to the motion to withdraw, Corso introduced Martinez to attorney Vanessa Kosky. “At the initial meeting with previous counsel, Ms. Kosky and Mr. Corso led the defen dant to believe that Mr. Corso would still be working on the case, although new attorney, Vanessa Kosky, would be coun sel of record,” according to the motion. Corso told The Times that though he was disqualified from being their attorney, the judge did allow for Corso to assist the new attorneys for the Martinez couple. “I remained involved to a point just to kind of help coor dinate information with the family,” Corso said, citing his knowledge of the case and Spanish-speaking ability. The motion went on to state there is an argument that Kosky was a “front person for the dis qualified attorney” and that she “did not do any significant work on his case.” Corso was present at the plea but did not have much com munication with Kosky before hand, having to translate for the family out in the plaza after the hearing, he said. Martinez's new attorney, Hammond Law, did not return a request for comment on the motion. The hearing is set for Tues day, Feb. 20, before Deal. Because she is under sub poena for Tuesday's hearing, Kosky declined to comment. FROM 1A Entrance “The owner is responsible to main tain safe passage on it. The owner of the property is aware and must repair it in order for GDOT to reissue a permit.” To reach the shopping center or Mis ter Car Wash, vehicles can turn into the driveway at the signalized intersection that lines up with Green Hill Circle.
