RESEDA : Agencies for Elderly Slash Aid Programs

The remaining staff at the Reseda-based Organization for the Needs of the Elderly faced a grim chore this week.

Those in the office who haven’t been laid off were put to work telephoning elderly, infirm clients to break the news that the organization would no longer provide them with a hot daily meal, a twice-monthly bath or chore services on which many have come to depend.

“They say: ‘How can you do this?’ They cry,” said Estelle Cooper, executive director of the group.

As of today, agencies such as ONE, which provide social services for the elderly under contract with the Los Angeles Department of Aging, are cutting programs because of this year’s shrunken pool of state and federal funds. Older people with family members nearby to help care for them were first in line for cuts in services, Cooper said.

The city’s Department of Aging has lost about 6% of its $8.8-million budget this year, said Faye Washington, general manager. Most of the cuts came as a result of declining funds from the financially strapped state government, and cuts in funding through the federal Older Americans Act.

Through its contractors, the Department of Aging provides home-delivered hot meals to about 3,000 people in Los Angeles, said Washington. Citywide, about 150 recipients of Homebound Meals and other home-delivered meals programs will be cut off as of today, she said.

Among those dropped from the program is 73-year-old Allie Moore, a Reseda woman suffering from dementia. Moore’s sister and conservator, Ann Nichols, has ordered the hot meals to feed Moore five days a week while Nichols is at work. Without the meals, Moore--who is provided with a pension and Social Security benefits that amount to less than $1,000 per month, according to her sister--faces spending the rest of her life in a convalescent home.

After Nichols complained, she was granted a nine-day extension of the service so she can make new plans for Moore.

“There is nothing to replace it. I have to make some arrangement,” said Nichols. “I just think it’s reprehensible that a 73-year-old disabled citizen, a taxpayer for 40 years, would have to give up their hot meal.”