Audit: Funds for Senior Meals Not in Equal Portions

Senior citizens in West and South County might not be getting their fair share when it comes to meal programs for the elderly, according to an audit commissioned by the Orange County Grand Jury.

The 66-page study found that one of three organizations providing meals for seniors, the Anaheim-based Feedback Foundation, received 63% of the county’s nutrition funds, even though it serves an area containing 39% of the county’s senior population.

By contrast, South County Senior Services receives 22% of food funding, but covers about 31% of the county’s elderly population, according to the report. Senior Meals and Services, which provides meals to Westminster, Garden Grove and surrounding communities, receives 15% of the available funding but covers a territory where 30% of the county’s elderly live.

The audit calls on the county to fix the “imbalance” by changing the way it distributes money, and recommends ways to make the meals program more efficient and fair. The study was completed in June, and in recent weeks officials from West and South County cities have urged supervisors to look into the issue.

“The money is not being distributed on a fair and equitable basis,” Garden Grove City Manager George Tindall said. “The whole way they distribute the money has to be reexamined.”

At issue is $3.3 million in mostly federal money distributed by the county’s Area Agency on Aging to three nonprofit organizations, which provide senior centers in their zones with a total of 1.7 million meals each year. The meals are served at community centers and delivered to homes.

Jerry Bellsmith, administrative manager for the agency, defended the way the county distributes funding, noting that the California Department of Aging rated Orange County as having the most cost-effective program in the state.

Bellsmith said the audit oversimplified matters in comparing the funding received by the three agencies to the percentage of senior citizens living in each zone. The county uses a more complex distribution formula that also takes into account income level and race, as federal laws suggest.

“That’s not to say that we can’t do a better job, and can’t look at other ways to be cost effective,” he said. “But I haven’t seen any indication that seniors want or would gain any extra services by making changes to our service areas.”

Supervisor Charles V. Smith said his staff is also examining the dispute with an eye toward streamlining the distribution process and reducing costs. “I think there can be improvements, but we haven’t totally defined the problem,” he said. “We are moving ahead with caution.”

Smith and other county officials said the audit, prepared by Ford Sauvajot Management Group Inc. of San Diego, contains some inaccurate data, making it more difficult to quickly reach any conclusions.

The audit notes that the Feedback Foundation, which gets the lion’s share of the county’s senior food funding, doesn’t seem to benefit from the economics of scale, and has the highest average cost per meal, $2.63. By comparison, Senior Meals and Services had an average meal cost of $1.89 and South County Senior Services’ average cost was $2.37, according to the study.

But Shirley Cohen, executive director of Feedback, insisted Monday that the numbers were wrong. She provided an Area Agency on Aging breakdown for June 1997 showing that Feedback had the lowest average meal cost, followed by Senior Meals and South County.

Cohen said she considered the county’s current funding distribution system to be “fair,” noting that her organization serves many poor and minority seniors in Santa Ana, Anaheim and other parts of the county.

“I don’t know what the grand jury was thinking,” she said.

Others, however, believe the audit exposes some serious problems with the senior meals program.

Celeste Jardine-Haug, director of the Oasis Senior Center in Newport Beach, said she hopes the audit prompts the county to reexamine how it doles out funding for meals.

“Once [the county] decides to give an organization a certain amount of money, it’s difficult to pull away and not give as much,” she said. “But that doesn’t make it fair.”

Jardine-Haug said she favored a “performance based” system in which the county would more closely scrutinize the cost of providing meals to seniors and provide contracts to the organizations with the more efficient operations.

The audit said that if the county distributed meal funds in direct proportion to the senior population in the three areas, Feedback’s North and Central County operation would lose $801,000 in annual funding, while South County Senior Services would gain $293,000 and West County’s Senior Meals would gain $507,000.

The grand jury report suggested that the county either restructure the current boundaries to provide “improved . . . and more cost-effective service,” or scrap the zones all together, allowing individual cities to arrange for their own services.