The future of expanded senior home-delivered meals is weighing heavy on the minds of south western Kentucky’s leaders.
This includes Trigg County Judge-Executive Stan Humphries and his magistrates, who Monday night took time to discuss what the landscape might look like between the end of this current seven-week extension of three-meals-a-week through the Pennyrile Area Development District and Pennyrile Allied Community Services, and the reconvening of the Kentucky General Assembly in January.
There is a window, Humphries said, that currently remains bitterly open between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day — and likely longer — and at the moment no answer on how to fill such a gap.
Humphries said he was “very irritated” that there isn’t a way to feed Trigg County’s 100-person list, especially since it’s more than a meal, but a wellness check that local seniors have come not only to expect, but appreciate.
State attention, Humphries said, has turned dramatically toward this issue.
If nothing changes in Frankfort, or through the Department of Aging and Independent Living, before the biennium budget cycle begins, Humphries said Trigg County — and other areas in the Pennyrile — will be faced with a singularly tough decision:
“How does one provide for those that are lost off the list?”
And until those contractual obligations expire, it’s worth noting that senior home-delivered meals lists are private documents that legally cannot be shared — meaning it cannot be fully known who needs help until the services end.
After that, Humphries said it could be a rotary club, a church, a non-profit organization, the fiscal court itself or some other entity that could bolster spirits until state legislators clear the muck.
Humphries added that the Trigg County Senior Citizens Center, ever popular as it is, serves no less than 50 congregate meals on a daily basis — with that likely to increase as rolls are reduced, and attrition increases through this process.
Magistrate Cameron Sumner said he has seen his opinion of senior programming swing tremendously during his tenure.
Magistrate Mike Wright seconded that “wholly” — noting he had seen the program’s positive effects firsthand through his late mother, Mary Ann.
