Senior meal program gets reprieve
By Sophia Fischer
sfischer@theacorn.com

The senior meals program in Thousand Oaks is safe for now.

On April 1, the Ventura County-run senior nutrition program will undergo a restructuring that officials hope will permanently save it countywide.

Last summer, the county’s budget crisis nearly resulted in the service being completely cut. Since then the county has worked to come up with a way to retain the program.

The new solution converts the service from county-run to being run by individual cities, including Thousand Oaks. It’s a temporary fix for the 2005-06 fiscal year. Funding beyond that is uncertain due to the county’s huge budget deficit. In an effort to rein in the deficit, the county has asked cities to take on the day-to-day operation of each congregate meal site. Until now, county staff cooked, delivered and served the meals. About $1 million in federal funds and donations did not fully cover the program and the county was left to pick up a $400,000 tab.

"The county just couldn’t continue putting in the money," said Victoria Jump, director of the Ventura County Area Agency on Aging, which runs the nutrition program. "The new model is much more cost-effective."

Under the restructuring, the county will continue to pay for the food and deliver it, but instead of paying for preparation and service, the county will order frozen foods from a distributor and will provide a portion of the federal grants to each individual city to hire its own site coordinators to run the program. Cities will have to kick in additional money to cover the costs.

"The bottom line is, if we didn’t get a site coordinator, we wouldn’t be serving meals in our community," said Mina Layba, senior analyst for Thousand Oaks.

Last week, the Thousand Oaks City Council agreed to take on the responsibility of providing a site coordinator to manage the daily operation of meal service. The city will contract with Senior Concerns, which oversees the Thousand Oaks meal site, to provide a site coordinator. The contract is on a year-to-year basis to allow the city to monitor whether or not the restructuring is effective.

"We are taking a wait-and-see approach. Let’s see if this money covers the cost," Layba said. "What do we do? People need to eat."

The cost in Thousand Oaks to provide a site coordinator is estimated to be about $38,500. Funding will come from several sources, including about $15,500 in federal funds provided through the county, about $8,000 in Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) approved by the city council and about $23,400 in donations by meal site participants. Although not required, a donation of a couple of dollars for a meal is suggested from each program participant. Until now the county retained those donations for the program. Under the restructuring, cities will use those donations for site coordination.

"Our city was very generous in providing the CDBG funding. Not all cities provide this," Layba said.

In addition, the county will no longer retain staff to prepare and deliver meals. Those employees will be laid off as of April 1. Senior Concerns is considering hiring one of the affected county employees as the site coordinator for the Thousand Oaks meals program, according to Layba.

For now, the county is contracting with ConAgra Foods to provide nutritionally balanced frozen meals to each site. Jump hopes to begin providing steamer trays of food, rather than individual meals, to each site sometime this summer. This would allow each city to order whatever food their seniors prefer and to manage dietary needs such as salt, sugar and portion control.

"Cities have said all along that they want to provide a more traditional meal," Jump said. "We hope to do this, but for now we need to get this program up and running and then we’ll worry about the food."

About 900 seniors throughout the county receive their meals year-round through the program. In Thousand Oaks, 40 to 50 meals are served Monday through Friday at the Goebel Center. For many it is their only hot meal of the day and an important outlet for socialization.

Meals on Wheels, a food delivery service for the homebound, is a separate program not funded through the county, so it is not affected by the changes.

For more information on the meal program, contact Senior Concerns at (805) 497-0159.