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Mahoning COUNTY ISSUE Victory for seniors
YOUNGSTOWN
A new 1-mill, five-year real-estate tax levy for senior services in Mahoning County passed with 55 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election.
“The reason for the passage of the levy is the voters recognize the need for services for older adults,” said Joseph Rossi, chief executive officer of the Niles-based Area Agency on Aging 11, which will administer the levy funds.
“We’re very excited. It’s really a great day for the seniors in Mahoning County, but the hard work begins now — putting together the advisory council and starting the processing of contracting with providers” of services, he said.
The agency will begin seeking this month a Mahoning County office location from which it will administer the programs, he said.
Collections of levy funds will begin with the first-half tax collection next year, with services likely to begin in mid-2017, he said.
Supporters of the countywide levy said older people and family members who care for them could look forward to a quality-of-life improvement if it passed.
They said it would cost the owner of a $100,000 home about $36 a year, which amounts to a dime a day, but would generate about $4.1 million in annual revenue.
Currently, about $900,000 in federal money and about $300,000 in state money annually pays for senior services in the county.
Through federal and state cuts, the Area Agency on Aging 11 has lost about 38 percent of its federal and state funding for senior-citizen services in the last six years, Rossi said during the campaign.
The extra money from the levy will likely eliminate waiting lists for senior services, which now total nearly 1,000 county residents, Rossi said.
Supporters said the levy would provide a variety of services to people age 60 and older, including adult day care, chore services, home repair and maintenance, homemaker, protective and personal-care services, medication management, guardianships and home-delivered and congregate meals.
If services can be provided to enable senior citizens to remain safely in their homes, caregiving family members will experience fewer absences from work, Rossi said.
A major theme of the levy campaign was the aging of the county’s population. Some 27 percent of Mahoning County’s population of 229,484 is older than 60, according to the Scripps Gerontology Center, which projects that percentage will rise to 34 percent of a total county population that will have declined to 201,097 in 2030.
Senior levies in adjoining counties are 0.75-mill in Trumbull County and 0.50-mill in Columbiana County. Ashtabula County has a 1-mill senior levy.
Seventy-three of Ohio’s 88 counties have a senior services levy.
Trumbull County’s senior levy has been renewed twice, most recently last November, by a landslide of nearly 4-1.
One of the most prominent supporters of the Mahoning County levy was Harry Meshel, 91, of Youngstown, a former Ohio state senator.