Word: elders
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Councillor Sheila E. Russell, chair of the elder affairs committee, emphasized the importance of making state officials aware of the effects of government actions on individuals. "They just go slashing away, not realizing whose lives they're hurting," Russell said in an interview Monday...
According to John F. O'Neill, an administrator with Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services, the state's Executive Office to Elder Affairs proposed the consolidation as a cost-cutting measure. He said the consolidation, designed to save $2 million, would take effect on July 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year...
...consolidation would condense the three Elder Services Home Care programs in Boston, the South Shore program and the Cambridge-Somerville program into one office, which would probably be located in Boston. According to O'Neill, those five agencies are among the largest in the state, accounting for 25 percent of the Elder Affairs budget...
...Neill added that the proposed cut comes after "two of the biggest years of cutbacks in this institution's history." He said that because of budget restraints, he has seen the Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services clientele shrink from 45,000 at the end of 1988 to little more than 33,000 today...
However, according to O'Neill, the only action available to municipal politicians and officials who want to block the consolidation is to lobby state lawmakers, who control the purse strings of the Executive Office of Elder Affairs. "All we can do is put pressure," he said...