Lewis County Senior Centers to Remain Funded by County Through 2017

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Following an occasionally volatile meeting at Winlock’s Olequa Senior Center on Tuesday, Lewis County Commissioners announced at the beginning of a Wednesday meeting in Toledo that they would be fully funding the county’s five senior centers through the end of next year.

Commissioner Edna Fund said the decision was made during Wednesday morning’s weekly directors meeting and was based on possible problems with cutting contracts and services on June 30, 2017, the date originally floated as a cutoff for county funds allocated for the senior centers.

Impassioned testimony received at Tuesday’s meeting, packed with dozens of seniors, also swayed their position, Fund said.

The county will be providing an anticipated $376,000 to keep senior centers in Winlock, Morton, Packwood, Toledo and Chehalis, as well as a food program at a church in Pe Ell, operating next year. The centers themselves raise around $325,000 annually, bringing the total operating expenses for the senior centers to $701,000 in 2017, according to county budget documents.

A one-year deadline also allows the senior centers and county time to begin looking for other funding options.

Fund said the county will begin assisting the centers to transition them to nonprofits or municipality-owned entities, allowing them to individually or collectively seek state and federal grants.

She said the commissioners will also petition the state Legislature to allow for a senior taxing district that could be used to fund the centers as well.

“The senior budget is a tough place where everybody is competing for these dollars,” Fund said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The mood at both meetings ranged from conciliatory to heated, with at least one shouting match occurring between county staff and a senior.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Central Services Director Steve Walton was heckled off the stage by a man who called his attempts to explain the budget crunch the county was facing “diversionary.”

Senior Janet Fulton-Perkins, at the same meeting, said the centers provided a place for many people to socialize and find a community when they might not otherwise have one.

“This is a really important place for people to gather,” she said. “I don’t think we should be left out. I don’t think we should be put on the bottom of the budget.”

That idea of the centers being a source of community beyond the nutrition and enrichment programs offered was echoed numerous times throughout both meetings.

Toledo resident Pauline Pedersen summed up a general mood after Tuesday’s meeting.

“It means friendship, education,” she said.

Many seniors also said they had paid taxes into local government coffers their whole lives and felt eliminating county funding for the centers was unfair, especially on the originally proposed June 30 deadline.

“These people are trying to say that they’re for services,” Toledo resident Joe Martin said Wednesday. “These people have already paid their dues.”

Others took a softer tone, saying they realized the county was having trouble balancing declining timber and interest revenue with increasing unfunded state mandates like providing indigent legal defense or medical care in the county jail, a point Fund had brought up many times in the meetings.

“Each of us need to get together” and pool resources, said attendee Elizabeth Hicker at Wednesday’s meeting. “You’re worth it, you are, every one of you.”

Jo Jones, who is involved with the Vision Toledo group, said seniors should begin looking for ways to self-fund their services, including possibly raising prices for services.



“As much as we would like the county to pay for this, we will have to absorb it,” she said.

In a preliminary budget the county released last week, nearly 80 percent of the more than $36.7 million of general fund expenditures went to public safety and law and justice expenses. These include jail and law enforcement expenses.

Many seniors at the meetings questioned whether the county could reduce these expenses, much of which it is required to pay by state law with little or no flexibility.

One expense that Fund has pointed out is a $1 million gap for indigent defense of inmates in the county jail, for which the county must foot the bill.

But many seniors expressed outrage at Fund, who spent time at the county’s senior centers during her 2016 campaign. She defeated challenger Dan Keahey, a Port of Centralia commissioner who was highly critical of the county and its budgeting practices. Many said they felt betrayed, with one even voicing support for a recall.

“Every vote she got was on the backs of seniors,” said Connie Sneed, who sits on the Winlock Senior Center Advisory Board.

Commissioner Gary Stamper had little to say at the meetings, but assured those in attendance the county was taking a serious look at the issue.

“It did not get in the newspapers, but we are looking at all options,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re really hamstrung on this.”

Stamper had been quoted in an article in The Chronicle, first published online Monday night, following the commissioners’ meeting earlier that morning, as saying “We’re looking at all the options … we’re gonna uncover every rock.”

Commissioner Bill Schulte, who has been on a leave of absence since September for cancer treatment, and who serves as chairman of the board when his health allows, was at both the Monday commissioners meeting and the meeting on Wednesday.

“We govern with your consent, and I want to listen today,” he said Wednesday.

The option to defund senior centers was raised by the commissioners in budget meetings at least by late October, but no solid numbers were available until a preliminary budget was released earlier in November.

The county is planning on using some $2.3 million of the general fund reserves to cover expenditures in the 2017 budget, and commissioners have said they were looking at non-mandated programs to cut. This included the senior programs, which encompass two general programs: nutrition and enrichment.

Nutrition programs help provide the Twin Cities Senior Center with five meals a week, and two meals weekly at the other locations. It is partially funded through the Lewis-Mason-Thurston Area Agency on Aging, who receives federal grants to run food programs. County staff have previously said if the county pulled out of their partnership, the Agency would begin looking for another partner to provide food services or supply meal vouchers.

The enrichment programs, partially funded by the centers themselves, bring classes, dances, game nights and other programs to the centers.

Commissioners have said they received legal advice from the county prosecutor’s office that these programs could be interpreted as a gift of public funds under the state Constitution, since the gifting of public funds is designated for the poor and infirm. The county has not established criteria to determine which seniors would fit that requirement.

However, Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer said in previous coverage that a state statute allows for the county to provide their current level of services, and that he was not aware of any legal challenges that have arisen over the discrepancy between state statute and the state Constitution. He also said the commissioners knew about the discrepancy since at least 2011.

Fund said Wednesday that a meeting will be scheduled in mid-December at which the county senior centers will meet to decide how to proceed.

Four more meetings at area senior centers are scheduled for the next month.