Saratoga News

Adult day-care center to get facelift with CBDG money

By Sarah Lombardo

The Adult Day Care Center will soon receive a facelift, thanks to Community Development Block Grants funding allocated by the Saratoga City Council March 18.

The $100,000 grant is slated for rehabilitating and improving the senior wing of the city's Community Center, which houses the day-care program. But it wasn't the only grant made in response to a Saratoga Area Senior Coordinating Council's request. The adult day-care program itself received $32,228 in CDBG funds to continue its services to local seniors.

Other local agencies also fared well.

Project Match, based in San Jose, will receive $14,700 to support the Saratoga Senior Group Residence rent subsidy. The Senior Group Residence is located on Blauer Drive. The project helps provide affordable housing to low-income Saratoga seniors and has received funding from the city since 1991.

Tri-Aegis Residential Services Inc. will be able to complete safety improvements to a local home for adults with developmental disabilities now that the council has approved a $7,500 grant to the agency. The home, located on Vanderbilt Avenue, provides not only a home for six low-income adults, but also 24-hour staffing care and supervision.

The grant to the Vanderbilt Project follows a total of $100,000 given to the agency in fiscal years 1995-96 and 1996-97 to purchase the home and a $5,000 grant in 1997-98 to make safety modifications to a sprinkler system at the home. This year's grant is expected to be spent on completing the sprinkler project and on installing double-pane windows throughout the house to better maintain the temperature in the home.

Saratoga receives CDBG funds from federal Housing and Urban Development Act funds. The funds are administered throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development for eligible projects, and nonentitlement cities--cities with a population of less than 50,000--receive the funds through an agreement with the county.

Each year, the council is petitioned at public hearings by local and Bay Area agencies for a piece of the CDBG pie. Although the staff makes recommendations about which agency should receive how much, the requests made at the hearings have in the past often led to the City Council to make changes in the recommendations. Every year, councilmembers must face too many applicants vying for what some call too little money. This year, however, the process was streamlined.

"In Saratoga's process, all that was done at the staff level," Mayor Don Wolfe said.

According to Wolfe, many of the applicants were screened by the staff before they reached the council.

"We were not put in a position of turning down various applicants," he said, "and we feel the money is well spent."

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