Senior Center leadership has asked Humboldt County commissioners to help expand homemaker services and the bus service.
Board members Tom Brissenden and Bernadette Newton joined senior center director Patricia Tindall Feb. 25 to ask the commissioners to re-instate an item they formerly had in the budget that provided $7,000 to a private entity, Nevada Home Health, to assist disabled seniors with homemaking services. Nevada Home Health is no longer in business in Winnemucca.
"As of last year, we picked up the homemaking services that previously two private entities had not been able to make successful," Brissenden said.
"We have a grant for about $9,000 to provide homemaker services in our community. In the past year we've grown from two homemakers and four clients to four homemakers and nine clients; we have four on the waiting list."
Brissenden said the homemaking program can help keep seniors out of institutional care.
"Our homemaking services provide a little more than just the usual housekeeping - we help with laundry and prepare meals for the weekend," Brissenden said.
He said since the county has been willing to grant support to the private companies providing homemaking services, the senior center board members hoped the county would be willing to consider shifting that allocation to them.
He said a grant of $7,000-10,000 would allow the senior center to continue and improve homemaking services to seniors in the county.
County administrator Bill Deist confirmed the county had provided support for homemaking services in the past.
"This will require us to look at it during the budget process and see how it shakes out with everything else," Deist said, adding the money came from the indigent fund portion of the county budget.
The second request was to develop a grant application that would allow continuation of the bus system. That service has been supported through a grant from the Nevada Department of Transportation but funding is not available this year.
"This means, if we want to continue running the bus service, we will have to write for grant funding for rural transit, which is not limited to serving seniors," Tindall said. "Anyone could ride the bus for a fare."
The former NDOT grant paid 80 percent of the cost of the bus service; the new grant, if obtained, would pay 60 percent.
Tindall said they had previously been able to obtain a match grant through aging and disability services to pay the remaining 20 percent of the program cost. She believes they might be able to apply through aging and disability services for an independent living grant to subsidize seniors and low-income individuals' ticket costs.
Tindall said ticket prices would be set to support the portion of transit system costs not covered by grants.
She said the service would operate a "deviated fixed route" - meaning the bus would pick people up at their homes, and the fixed part of the route would be dropping people off at scheduled central locations such as a grocery store or doctors' offices.[[In-content Ad]]
