The Camp Verde Town Council agreed Aug. 3 to provide $25,000 of a $50,000 funding request by the Verde Valley Senior Center to help support the center’s Meals on Wheels program.
While the $25,000 was approved for immediate access, the council decided to wait until January to discuss additional funding, which will be dependent on the state of the town’s budget at that time.
“We’ve been providing meals to the citizens of Camp Verde for over 20 years, and most of those years were without any kind of compensation from Camp Verde,” said the Senior Center’s Executive Director Elaine Bremner. “Every single week, we provide top-quality items for those people, and I’m requesting $50,000 so Camp Verde can step up and pay their fair share of what it costs to provide the service.”
Bremner discussed labor shortages and issues with food vendors and deliveries “not coming in at [proper] temperature.”
“[The vendors] are having a problem with labor shortages; they’re not getting the trucks loaded in time and their trucks aren’t operating properly, and I temp-check everything,” she said.
While Camp Verde has funded the program’s operations for the past several years — $7,500 in 2019, $15,000 in 2020, and $20,000 last year — this year’s contribution will be the town’s largest so far, as the program continues to expand despite uncertain times.
“We’ve delivered almost 11,000 meals to the residents of Camp Verde,” Bremner said. “This does not include Lake Montezuma or any of those areas, and we traveled almost 10,000 miles to do this and we have expenses; it averages out to about $10.79 per meal. We have a waiting list with a couple of dozen people waiting to get meals. We have four routes now. If you want to see the real price of the elderly in your community that would not live without this service, this is a life-saving community service.”
Despite the sizeable request, Bremner said that operational costs could exceed $110,000, which she plans on subsidizing with funds from the Northern Arizona Council of Governments and additional fundraisers.
Currently, the organization does not receive funding from Yavapai County.
“I fund-raise every day of the week,” Bremner said. “Contributions, I think, from Camp Verde residents last year totaled less than $4,000.”
In addition to funding assistance, Bremner said the organization is “absolutely” looking for volunteers.
“It’s on the radio all the time,” she said.
For more information about the program, visit the verdevalleyseniorcenter.org