Officials with Uinta Senior Citizens’ Inc. discussed their home delivered meal program with Uinta County commissioners during their regular work session on Tuesday.

Sarah Blakeman, executive director of USCI, said the center recently switched to prepackaged home delivered meals, resulting in some public outcry when the hot meal program was discontinued.

She told commissioners that USCI was typically delivering about 160-180 meals on a daily basis Monday through Friday to home-bound seniors in Uinta County.

“There was some confusion about why we went to a frozen meal program,” Blakeman said. “There was an unfavorable response from the Bridger Valley.”

She said the reasoning behind the decision was based purely on finances.

Blakeman said they looked at how expensive it was to provide hot meals — $11.11 per meal — with only about half of that reimbursed from state and federal funding and a suggested donation from clients.

She said $5.54 per meal was not being reimbursed at all, making the cost for the USCI, $891.20 per day, $17,824 per month and $213,888 per year

“That money was coming from other senior programs, like home health and hospice,” she said. “We just could not sustain that any longer.”

She said they looked at several options, such as delivering hot meals, but fewer times a week.

“We didn’t want to do that because I felt it left a big gap in services,” Blakeman said.

So she said they looked at bigger “Meals on Wheels” programs in Cheyenne and Casper that provided prepackaged meals delivered once a week.

She said that cost only totalled $4.77 per meal and included everything the client needed for meals for a full seven days, delivered once a week.

“We no longer needed to subsidize from other programs for that,” she said. “Our intention is to be able to afford the cost of meals without draining other programs.”

She said this seemed like a reasonable solution to rising food and gas prices.

“The only thing we can do is control costs the best we can and provide services the best we can,” Blakeman said. “Did I want to change to prepackaged meals? No. I liked the hot meals.”

She said another objection people brought up was the fact that when the person’s meal was delivered, it also served as a welfare check to the severely at-risk seniors.

One thing they’ve done to solve that is to have volunteers visit with those seniors outside of delivering meals.

“We have four to five volunteers that go and visit with them every day for a good 20 minutes,” Blakeman said. “The quality of the interaction is better than before.”



Amy subdivision approved

During the commission’s regular meeting, commissioners approved a map amendment and subdivision of Amy subdivision.

The proposed 23 acre parcel is just north of the town of Bear River on U.S. Highway 89 and the owners wished to change the zoning from agricultural use to residential use in order to subdivide it.

The subdivision will include five lots of four to five acres each for single family residents.



Other business

Eric Busse with the Mountain View Lions Club requested and was granted a temporary liquor license for their annual fund-raiser at the Fort Bridger Rendezvous, Aug. 29-Sept. 1.

Patricia Arnold, nurse manager for Uinta County Public Health, requested that the commissioners sign a memorandum of understanding to allow a coalition of individuals representing public health, BOCES, Evanston Regional Hospital, Evanston Housing Authority and Wyoming State Hospital to obtain a Community Healthcare Assessment Grant.

The grant would allow the coalition to conduct an assessment on how to recruit, train, house and attract more health care professionals to Evanston and Uinta County.

“We would probably target this a lot toward nursing, because there is such a shortage,” Arnold said.