Funding Shortfall Causes Cuts to Local Senior Citizens' Meals Program Across Kentucky

It is with short notice, great heartbreak, and devastation that I have no other option but to send the letter below to over 125 seniors in our county on Monday, September 29th.

JACKSON COUNTY SENIOR CENTER

PO BOX 126

1035 McCAMMON RIDGE ROAD

MCKEE, KY 40447

TO: Senior Citizen Meal Participants

FROM: Annette Deaton, JCSC, Inc. Director

After receiving a memo from the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the Department for Aging and Independent Living, stating that COVID-19 federal dollars, as well as other awarded state dollars, will end effective September 30, 2025, due to this loss of funding and other federal policy changes, we will not have the funding required to continue providing Hot Home Delivered and Moms Meals services to our seniors in Jackson.

This means 125 seniors are losing 2000 meals per month as of September 30th! This is not just affecting Jackson County itself, but a statewide cut affecting all seniors, senior programs, and senior centers in every ADD district of Kentucky.

The center will remain open to onsite congregate services with limited funding while implementing a meal reservation system for the seniors that have lost meal services. Hopefully, this will get us through until other funding or our new 2026 fiscal year funding becomes available. Such being the case, and we pray it is, we will continue to follow up with each of you as we know more.

We will continue to monitor funding utilization closely as we also look for additional funding support from other avenues, such as local government, sponsors, grants, individual and/or group donations, churches, etc., and also private and public sectors of the community for help to supplement this great loss.

We will continue to fight for, stand up for, and provide assistance for our seniors throughout this process. We thank you for your continued commitment and support to the Senior Meal Program.

This all started during the COVID pandemic. (Might I add we remained open during the whole pandemic!) We were told by the Governor's office, the CVADD-London, and DAIL in Frankfort, we should no longer have a waiting list of people wanting meals! They were pushing us to put them on Moms Meals in the more rural unreachable areas and add people to our Hot Meals program. So that’s what we did. They wanted that COVID money spent but did not tell us it would be exhausted by the end of September 2025, until mid last week. While having no plan or funding in place to support all these people’s meals we picked up per the COVID epidemic. Now we are left with the burden of taking away these elderly people’s meals while figuring out a way to keep our centers open and our elderly fed. We lost 125 meals, hot and cold! I had to lay off both meal delivery drivers effective Tuesday, September 30th, the same date as meals ending. Now with the cold meals or Moms Meals, the situation is different. These meals were added to our budget with COVID funding only and we will not be getting those back, nor would we get reimbursed for picking them back up. The only option for these meals/seniors is for another entity or persons to pick up the cost. Besides laying off some staff, I am forced to cut back other staff's hours to 4 hours per day and we have no choice but to go to 4 days a week, and possibly 3 days. I’ll know more after September’s invoice! I’ve had to cut back or stop several operating expenses as well, such as waste management pick up, advertising, and office/janitorial supplies. This has been devastating, not to mention on very short notice all within 2 days this past week! We are already at our crucial point of trying to keep the center open and cannot wait until January for the legislative session to start. We are one of 3 counties that are already out of funding for these particular services. There is no money, we were told over a Zoom meeting yesterday by the CVADD and DAIL (Dept of Aging and Independent Living) unless the governor called a special session to address this now it was left up to us and our counties to try to come up with the money in order to keep our centers up and running and our Hot Meals program. With that being said, right now we are gonna continue to operate with very little congregate meals money which will serve only 12 people 4 days a week instead of 5, if this is even feasible for our caterer to do, which could become another issue. Same thing with our Home-care services money which we hope will last through June 30th but it is possible it won’t unless we get some sponsors or donations! At this point, I’m just trying to keep the Senior Center open with what little funding we do have in our county otherwise, it will go to other counties! I know it’s hard but right now we need everyone to stay positive, jump onboard and contact anyone you know that may be willing to sponsor a senior with a meal or help with funding. Each hot meal costs us $8.37, not including delivery. With delivery, it costs us $12.58. You do the math for 16 days per month and that’s how much it costs to feed one senior per month. Now if we can get at least 50 people, organizations, churches, etc. to sponsor just one elderly person with a meal we would be able to give that many elderly seniors their meals back. I am willing to eat the cost of delivery in order to do this! But I know there is enough money and people in Jackson County to help sponsor this small number. It’s not a lot but it’s not far from the numbers our previous budget allowed to begin with. At a minimum, if we can get enough sponsors/donations we would be able to go back to our pre-COVID numbers and continue some of the hot meals. I’m open to any ideas or suggestions if anyone has any.