Editorials

We've been there, done that. Lesson learned?

Now that acting town manager Jim Piper has decided he would like to look into the possibility of contracting with a nonprofit agency to handle the job of full-time senior coordinator, we've come full circle.

He suggests that it might be wise to contract out for this position just as the town now does with other senior services. The problem is this piecemeal approach provides inadequate programming for our town's older adults.

A few years ago, Family Service Association was the contract agency. FSA was taken over by Adult and Child Guidance which decentralized its services, moving the all-important case managers off site, and then reducing the case management team from two to one.

This chaos led to frustration for local seniors and eventually prompted the Los Gatos Weekly-Times to look into senior programming in Los Gatos and to compare it to other communities. We found Los Gatos sadly lacking.

Our story prompted several Los Gatans to pick up the gauntlet which led to the formation of the senior task force. This task force concluded, as did the Weekly-Times, that the situation would not improve significantly until the town committed resources to hiring a full-time coordinator of senior services.

The task force, seeing the obvious overlap between the town's responsibility and the programming offered by the recreation department suggested that the budget for a senior coordinator might be shared between the two.

This would make sense--except that in another "only in Los Gatos" approach to human services, the town does not actually fund a recreation department. The Los Gatos-Saratoga Department of Community Education and Recreation is operated by a joint powers authority comprised of school districts in the two communities.

The JPA was originally created to provide after-school and summer programming at schools in Saratoga and Los Gatos. It stills serves this need in both communities. However, Saratoga-- a city that offers a first-class senior center and program--eventually created its own recreation program.

Los Gatos did not.

To its credit, the JPA filled the gap in Los Gatos and developed a recreation program. Still, it creates one more degree of separation from the town, and thereby helps contribute to the sense that services for seniors are fragmented.

The community services commission recommended that the town fully fund the position rather than try to split it. Given the two jurisdictions, that seems reasonable.

Following the presentation by the commission on July 17, Councilman Randy Attaway acknowledged that in terms of services for seniors, " ... we've never taken a strong role ourselves as a town."

The time to do so is now.

 

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