Minutes 05-17-2018 Budget Public Hearing

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reasons, and thus OCRA is now an affiliate with Meals On Wheels, and serves 93 people weekly. She said isolation is hard on the seniors, and breeds all of kinds of depression. She said OCRA has and a social interaction program, and from that information it is learned who has nutritional needs. She said OCRA has many alliances with churches and businesses in the area, as well as the Department on Aging. She thanked the Board for its support this past year. Stephanie Kilpatrick said she is the Residential Services Director for the InterFaith Council (IFC), and she encouraged the Board to consider IFC’s request for increased funding this coming year. She said IFC appreciated the Board’s financial support last year too. Elvira Mebane thanked the Board of County Commissioners for its service to Orange County residents. She shared a letter that she sent to the Manager and some staff, from the United Voices of Efland Cheeks, of which she is the president. She read the following letter: April 18, 2018 Dear Ms. Hammersley: On behalf of the Efland-Cheeks community we thank you for your vision to empower community-based entities like United Voices of Efland Cheeks with financial resources to play an active role in the operation of the Efland Cheeks Community Center. Our ability to offer various programs· and activities for the youth, senior citizens, community at-large, has reaffirmed to us that a Community Center without well designed and delivered programs and activities is simply an empty building. In addition to our Summer Youth Enrichment Program, we have also been able to offer special events such as the Art Show featuring two local community artists, and the Pencil Head Society, a teen writing group lead by a renowned poet, Jaki Shelton-Green. The programs and activities we have been able to offer the community has enhanced many lives. Our budget request for FY 2018-19 was based on our critical review of each program, activity, and existing human resources. We currently have a full-'time Center Manager, an administrative assistant (or back-up staff) 12 hours per week, and program coordinator for 24 hours a week for seven weeks, primarily during the summer. Because of the need the program coordinator continued on a voluntary basis through February 2018. Based on our experience, it became clear early on that the Center Manager can't keep the Center open while trying to coordinate programs and activities with other groups. The administrative assistant's hours are insufficient for the clerical and records management workload; and we proposed increasing this positon to 20 hours per week. To ensure that the Center is staffed fully at all times we proposed increasing the program coordinator hours to at least 20 hours a week year-round. This would relieve the Center Manager of trying to be in two or more places at a time. We tried to make these human resource changes within the existing allocation by reducing other areas in the budget. However, we were not able to accomplish this, which resulted in a budget request of22% or $18,714 above the current allocation. The other budget line items are fairly self-explanatory. We may be able to reduce these items ftu1her if we can maintain the proposed staffing, contract services, and summer program budgets.