Services aimed at improving the quality of life for Edgewood seniors have not climbed back to pre-Covid levels, but it is something local leaders are looking to address.
At a senior town hall meeting Jan. 5, attendees expressed a desire to see greater flexibility in transportation services and more in-home meal delivery for home-bound seniors.
At issue, however, is filling vacancies, said Matilda Byers,manager of the Santa Fe County Senior Services within the county’s Community Services Department.
“Because we’ve been limited with drivers, it has limited our ability to provide home delivered meals and take on new seniors, but we’ve done the best that we can,” she said. “However, we have had limitations on growing until we can fill this position. We have maintained the meals that we are currently serving.”
The service currently serves about 40 home-bound seniors, and with some luck, that number can grow soon, according to Aaron Price, activities director of the county’s senior center in Edgewood.
Eligible participants in the program must be 60 and older who are homebound, who don’t have a caregiver and who can no longer prepare for themselves, Byers said.
“And when we have the new candidate, new driver, we will be able to do more home-delivered meals and hopefully do more transportation,” Byers said. “I know that it’s a need in the area we are well aware of. In addition, come mid-year, we will be meeting with the commission and the county manager to ask for a new position for a driver just to provide transportation in the area because it’s something that we know we have the demand for. Now we need to fill the need.”
The problem, once again, she said, is finding qualified employees.
“Filling positions has been a challenge,” Byers said. “It’s taken us three months to fill this one driver’s position so we’re hoping that we will have better luck in filling for the transportation driver.”
In addition to meal service, participants were concerned that there was not enough local transportation for seniors to get around town, or to get to Albuquerque. And the only service to Santa Fe leaves the town in the morning and returns in the afternoon.
Edgewood Mayor Ken Brennan, who represents the town as a board member of the North Central Regional Transportation Division, said he has been pushing to get a pilot program that is currently being tested in Taos to begin soon in Edgewood.
“If you ever see the blue bus running around, that’s the NCRTD,” he said. “One of the things that they brought up is called a micro-transit system. And they started implementing it in Taos as a test run. And by all indications, it’s working really well. And for those that don’t understand what a micro-transit system is, it’s sort of like a government-run Uber system.”
It would give both seniors and teens lacking a driver’s license an option for getting around town, Brennan said, adding Edgewood is not only the second-largest town in the county in terms of population behind Santa Fe and it growing at a 5% rate, but it is also the state’s fifth-largest in terms of square mileage.
“You would call a number and say, Okay, I need to go to a certain place. And then they would come and get you to take you to that place,” he explained. “And you’d call him back later and say, okay, I need to go here or back to your home, it doesn’t matter.”
While such a program for Edgewood is in the works, Brennan said he would like to see it moving quicker, although there still is no firm timeline for it.
“I would like to see this accelerated,” he said. “We have a large senior community. We also have a large junior community where kids that don’t have driver’s licenses, or people who don’t have cars, the micro transit system, will help them out on that because that’ll give them opportunities to get around. It will also help us to link up with the Albuquerque transit system for people who need to go and do business in Albuquerque. So I have tasked the board to go ahead and start doing that.”