Three hundred Bella Vista residents sent a message to Mayor John DeStefano Monday night about the proposed closing of their senior center: “If you’re not with us now, just maybe we won’t be with you at election time in November.”
The closing of the Bella Vista Senior Center, along with those in Westville and West River, is among the proposed steps included in the mayor’s $464 million FY2009-2010 budget.
The prospect was loudly decried at Bella Vista Monday night by neighborhood Alderman Robert Lee and former Mayor John Daniels, who lives at Bella Vista and added pointedly political fuel to the already aroused residents of the senior housing complex on the east side of town.
“There are lots of school administrators making $100,000,” Daniels said. “Some of them should be laid off and then there would be money for all the senior centers. There are at least five or six aldermen who also work for the Board of Ed. Why are they not being laid off!”
The seniors had already presented hundreds of names on petitions to the mayor’s office, and were expecting a representative, Department of Elderly Services Acting Director Don Dimenstein, to address them. Five minutes into meeting, Lee received a call that Dimenstein would not be showing up.
“I feel, unfortunately, that this is how the mayor’s office treats the elderly,” Lee told the crowd. “We’re elephants, and we remember. If this situation isn’t righted, I just want to say that in November, well, it doesn’t look so good for him!”
The elderly services proposed budget cut is 28 percent, from $979,712 to $704, 417. For Bella Vista, that means most specifically that Jeanne Saldhana, a beloved program staffer, would be leaving after 26 years.
Her part-time salary and other expenses, Lee pointed out in a chart accompanying the petitions, amount only to $11,000.
“Even compared to the other centers, Bella Vista is just about the least expensive and serves the most people,” Lee said. “Why? Because there are a lot of volunteers. For that amount of money, it just doesn’t make sense to mess with people in the sunset of their years, people who pay taxes. “
“About 1,400 people live in Bella Vista,” said Patricia DePalma, the Ward 11 chairperson (pictured with Carabetta’s William Johnson). “They’re all Democrats, and they’re all angry at the mayor tonight.”
According to mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga, the city has made arrangements with Carabetta Management Company, the builders of and long-time on-site managers of Bella Vista, to continue many of the programs. The ceramics and yoga classes, she said will continue until July, the end of the fiscal year. The elderly nutrition program will continue indefinitely, and transportation will be provided without interruption to the surviving centers nearby on Atwater Street and on the East Shore.
“Believe me,” said Mayorga, “we’d like to have 12 senior centers. If more of the unions would have made the concessions and would have foregone some of those raises, there would be money for all the centers.”
Lee wasn’t buying the argument. Not for $11,000.
“I don’t think it’s the unions that should be blamed. Many of the workers don’t make very much. If you negotiate as a city badly, you, the negotiator, should be blamed, not individual workers. The mayor should look to that. Also, it’s not fair that the programs continue on Carabetta’s nickel. That’s not right.”
Ask Zoe Andrews, who’s lived in Bella Vista only two years. In many ways, she suggested the spirited gathering was as much pro-Jeanne Saldhana as it was anti-John DeStefano. Saldhana was not in attendance.
Louise Caronne, a nine-year Bella Vista resident, said, “Jeanne not only helps with processing rent rebates and all that, and arranges trips to the casino or the green market, but she is always there, so helpful, a real friend.”
According to William Johnson, Saldhana, who has bumping rights, would likely leave and take another worker’s job in one of the surviving centers. (Johnson’s grandfather built the complex in 1972.)
One of the reasons the city has offered for the closing of Bella Vista is that senior services are already offered there, namely by Carabetta. In fact William Johnson reassured the crowd that indeed that would be the case with services like tax rebate paperwork. But Carabetta can’t be counted on to take over the daily trips for seniors or Saldhana’s sessions.
The city would move out of Saldhana’s office space, saving it the rent money; Carabetta, said Johnson, would put that space back on the open market.
Next steps? Lee said now with the petitions filed, he will seek a meeting with the mayor. He encouraged the crowd to join him in appearing before the aldermanic Finance Committee next month on the closings.
At the meeting’s end, Mary Collurca (pictured on the right) took her cane, and said she’d be there. Another voice in the back of the room asked if the aldermanic chamber is big enough to hold all of Bella Vista.