By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Funding for home repairs for senior citizens in Wood County is not keeping up with the needs.
Lisa Myers, director of social services at the Wood County Committee on Aging, reported last week that the waiting list is growing of seniors who need help with maintaining their homes.
“There are going to be people we can’t serve this year,” Myers said during the WCCOA Board meeting on Wednesday.
The WCCOA received $37,485 this year from the Ohio Housing Trust Fund, with $22,000 already being spent. This funding is tied to seniors’ incomes, and is limited to $7,500 per job.
Another $22,500 has been awarded to WCCOA for a basic home repairs program, with $13,160 already being spent. This program typically pays about $2,500 per job, and is available to anyone over age 60, who is a resident of Wood County, owns their home and is current on their taxes.
There are currently 10 local senior citizens on the waiting list. They will be moved to next year’s home repair list if this year’s funding runs out before their repairs are made.
Myers explained that some of the repairs funded by these programs are major – involving roofs, furnaces or air conditioning. Some are smaller, such as installations of railings or grab bars.
In other business at last week’s meeting, WCCOA Executive Director Alisha Nenadovich reported that plans for the senior center basement project have been submitted to the Wood County Building Inspection Department for review.
Mosser Construction is in the process of getting bids from contractors. The final costs for the basement project should be known next week, “fingers crossed,” Nenadovich said.
Once completed, seniors will have two new rooms in the basement for programming:
- A woodshop for experienced woodworkers to revisit their hobbies or novices to learn new skills.
- A large exercise room, since several classes are so popular that students in the current first floor classroom often overflow into the hallway.
After budget constraints put the original plans on hold for nearly five years, the Wood County Committee on Aging was granted $500,000 from the state’s capital budget in 2024 for the basement completion.
The goal is to create a woodshop and build an exercise area nearly triple the current space. Other space in the basement is already dedicated to medical equipment for loaning out, and storage.
After touring a woodshop in the Sylvania senior center, the committee planning the basement project decided the woodworking space needed to be larger than originally planned in the Wood County Senior Center. The same decision was made about the new exercise space.
A lot of the woodworking equipment has already been donated, and the facility already has a self-contained sawdust collector.
Attendees for exercise classes are expected to welcome the enlarged space for classes such as yoga, tai chi, cardio drumming, and the Silver Sneakers program. The classroom will likely have a raised stage for the instructors.
The woodworking project may partner with the Wood County Veterans Service Office, which has been working on creating a woodworking program. The goal is to bring together local veterans in hopes of reducing levels of social isolation among that population. And the byproduct of that effort could be to create locally made wooden burial flag cases for survivors of veterans.
