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Agency That Serves Those 60 & Over Experiencing Decrease In Funding And Increase In Demand For Services

November 26, 2021 Steve Schwaller

(Spirit Lake)– An organization that serves those 60 and over in the region is facing some funding concerns. Elderbridge Agency on Aging serves a 29 county area of northwest Iowa, including Dickinson. CEO Shelly Sindt says it comes at a time when the demand for their services is greatly increasing as the population aged 60 and over has grown significantly…

“We have been functioning for 10 years on the 2010 census numbers. This year our funding was allocated to us based on the 2020 census, and I will tell our numbers of those 60 plus went up in all of our counties, but our funding went down. And the reason it went down is because the 60 plus population went up every where. And so between our state and our federal funding, we had almost a $300,000 reduction in funds.”

Sindt says they’re using federal pandemic relief money to offset that for now, but she says with that being divied up among the 29 counties, those funds will quickly run out. Sindt says they’ll be meeting in the coming days with state officials to plead their case for additional funding…

“We are meeting actually next Monday with the Iowa Department on Aging, asking them to look at the funding formula because it needs to be adjusted and weighted heavier for our rural communities. So I’m hoping to get some of that funding restored next fiscal year, but not this year.”

Sindt says of the counties they serve, Dickinson has the largest population of those 60 and over, with 34 percent of the county’s population falling in that category based on the 2020 census….a 3.9 percent increase from the 2010 census. Sindt made her comments at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

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