DANVILLE — Hiring another entity to manage the county-owned Vermilion Manor Nursing Home is one option county officials may consider as the long-term care facility has become unprofitable in the last year, mostly because of the state's financial struggles.

Vermilion County Board Chairman Jim McMahon said all options, including third-party management, are on the table as the county board will begin making some tough decisions in coming weeks on the direction of the county facility on Catlin-Tilton Road just west of Tilton.

At a special meeting Tuesday night, county board members learned that the nursing home has been profitable in the last several years, but not last year, when the state's fiscal problems caused major delays in revenue payments to the facility. A large chunk of the nursing home's funding comes from state Medicaid reimbursements.

The facility has a little more than 170 residents, and roughly 120 are Medicaid-assisted.

Financial consultant Mike Harmon with Source 1 Commercial Capital has analyzed the financial side of the nursing home in recent months, and John Weaver with the Public Building Commission and retired PBC maintenance supervisor Hershell Steenbergen spent the last five weeks assessing the nursing home from an infrastructure perspective. They reported their findings to the county board at the meeting Tuesday.

McMahon said the next report in coming weeks will be an analysis from Provena Life Connection, which has been analyzing the day-to-day operation of the nursing home in regard to management and health care.

Harmon told county board members that the two keys to the financial survival of the nursing home are ensuring the facility can meet its 2012 budget projections and maintaining an average 80-day billing cycle, which means receiving the money its owed within an average of 80 days after services are delivered.

In the last several years, the nursing home has stayed within an average 80-day cycle, but not last year. Several county board members said Tuesday night that they are not sure it's possible this year either, considering the state still has a backlog of bills. Harmon told county board members that the cycle could stretch out to 180 days if the nursing home had access to a $2 million line of credit that it could draw on when necessary.

After the meeting, McMahon said he does not believe the county should borrow money just because the state of Illinois isn't paying its bills.

The infrastructure outlook at the nursing home wasn't any better than the financial outlook. And Harmon told board members his financial assessment did not take into consideration the amount of money it would take to make the improvements that Weaver and Steenbergen identified in their report.

Weaver and Steenbergen told the board members that the 40-year-old facility requires a total of about $2.6 million in improvements to the building and grounds, including the parking lot, the boiler, the roof, gutters, downspouts, soffits and the canopy at the main entrance.

The building has much of its original equipment and infrastructure from the early 1970s, including the windows, ceiling tiles and floor tiles.

Weaver said the building and grounds have basically been ignored for 30 years, and there's no capital improvement money set aside and no short-term or long-term capital improvement plan.

McMahon said there is a capital improvements list, but since he's been chairman, the nursing home has not been profitable enough to be funneling money into a capital improvement fund. McMahon said the nursing home had been in a $1 million hole, and over a few years, climbed out of that hole and was ready to start putting money aside when the state began having its payment issues.