LULAC Steps In To Make Sure Senior Citizens Will Continue Getting Meals

For some El Paso County senior citizens, talk of hiring freezes, furloughs and salary cuts to balance the county’s budget mean nothing.

But those same senior citizens get upset when it’s mentioned that the nutrition program that provides them one hot meal a day is in danger of being cut.

“If it wasn’t for this…God, I don’t know. It’d be a lot of old folks here disappointed, you know?” said Humberto Lara. He and about 50 others go to the La Fe Montana Vista Community Center everyday, but the nutrition program serves about 1,200 seniors countywide.

Twenty-one senior centers countywide provide El Paso senior citizens with a hot meal every day. But that meal was in danger of being cut to help get the county back in the black.

According to Rosemary Neill, the Director of Family and community Services, the senior nutrition program was asked to take a $132,000 budget cut this year.

Neill said they tried to look at ways to trim the budget without hurting the meal service. Some county employees who work in the nutrition program were asked to scale back their hours from full-time to part-time positions. But there was still the transportation issue.

“The county came to us,” said Rosario Reynoso, Director of Operations for Medical Transportation/El Paso County Rural Transit at LULAC Project Amistad, a local non-profit. LULAC took over transportation services for about 70 county clients who live in rural areas. Their involvement ensures no senior is stranded if he or she wants to go to a center for the meal program.

Reynoso said LULAC applies for federal grant money every year under the “New Freedom Program,” which caters specifically to elderly or disabled citizens living outside a city but within a county that are in need of public transportation.

“It’s a win-win situation,” she said. Reynoso added that many of the county’s clients already fall into one of LULAC’s existing programs.

Neill said the plan was never to scrap the meals, but instead to look at ways to scale back transportation costs for dozens of seniors who live in rural parts of town and need a ride to the senior center.

“There’s a lot of people that can’t get around because they don’t have a way to get around,” said Rose Gandara, who was elected by the seniors at La Fe Montana Vista Community Center to register new people and collect donations. “I know that transportation is important to a lot of them,” she added.

Some seniors said maintaining the free transportation and meal service is not only a win-win situation– it’s also a politically smart one.

“Remember– we vote, most of us … so whoever cuts our meals probably won’t be commissioners,” Lara said with a smile.