It is with some trepidation and anxiety that the director of the Durango La Plata Senior Center will be closed on Fridays, which began this week, in the face of rising costs.
The center will expand its hours Monday through Thursday, opening at 7 a.m. rather than 8, and closing at 5 p.m. rather than 4:30, and provide extended transportation services. Meals on Wheels delivery will be available Friday and seniors can grab meals on Thursdays for the following day.
“This was a difficult decision,” Senior Center Director Vicki Maestas told the Board of County Commissioners during a meeting last month. “… It wasn‘t something that I was even willing to discuss two years ago.”
The move will save the center, which is crunched for cash, an estimated $18,000.
The Pine River Senior Center in Bayfield is not impacted.
Historically, about 60% of the Durango senior center’s revenue has come from state and federal sources, Maestas said, while 40% was drawn from the city of Durango and county’s joint sales tax. In recent years, those proportions have flipped.
The move is expected to ease pressure on the short-staffed kitchen team and hopefully ensure employee retention. By expanding the hours of transportation services, Maestas said she hopes the center can help get seniors to critical health care appointments.
The price of food spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and caused the senior center’s expenditures to surge. On average, the center served 37 meals per day to people in the Durango senior center and delivered 743 meals per week through Meals on Wheels.
There was a $28,000 disparity last year in the cost of meals and the state and federal funding, plus minimal donations, that fund them.
To pile on, Maestas said the uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s threat to freeze federal funding for some social services is cause for concern.
“We're all anxiously awaiting to see what will happen to those funds. They go to the San Juan Basin Area Agency on Aging and they are distributed to the senior centers within the region,” Maestas said. “But I would honestly say that there is probably not a senior center director who is not concerned regarding that potential federal freeze.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
