Nearly every weekday since 1984, Emma Medlock would make the one-block walk from her apartment to the South Jamaica Senior Center where she would have two meals, volunteer as a receptionist and play games and socialize with friends.
After budget cuts forced the South Jamaica Senior Center to close, that short walk has turned into a more-than-two-mile journey on a shuttle van to the Rockaway Boulevard Senior Center in South Ozone Park.
“I was just so upset because being there for so long, it was like a home away from home,” said Medlock, 88.
Medlock is one of many seniors throughout the city who are dealing with the closure of 29 senior centers – nine in Queens – that went into effect on July 1.
The nine shuttered senior centers are the JASA Astoria Senior Center, CCNS St. Mary’s Senior Center, JASA Jackson Heights Senior Center, JASA Whitestone Senior Center, CCNS Woodhaven Senior Center/Richmond Hill, CCNS Wakefield Senior Center, JSPOA Conlon, JSPOA Foster Laurie Senior Center and South Jamaica Senior Center.
“It’s such a misguided thought to do across the board cuts like this because it always is the population that has the least that is affected the most,” said Carol Hunt, the Executive Director of the Jamaica Service Program for Older Adults (JSPOA), which ran six senior centers in Queens – three of are now closed. “It’s just awful.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s executive budget had proposed $30.8 million in cuts to senior center services in the Department for the Aging (DFTA) budget, but the City Council restored $23.3 million that helped reduce the number of shuttered city senior centers from 50 to 29.
“As part of the budget negotiation with the mayor we were able to put back money in the budget to keep a few more of the senior centers open that were slated to close,” said Queens Councilmember Mark Weprin, who successfully advocated to keep the JASA Holliswood Senior Center open. The DFTA had decided not to renew the contract at Glenridge Senior Center, but City Council funding also helped keep that center open.
In order to determine what senior centers to close, the DFTA predominantly used a three-part criteria that included centers serving fewer than 30 meals daily, part-time and satellite centers and poor management or fiscal issues, according to DFTA spokesperson Jeanette Reed.
City Councilmember Leroy Comrie, who represents the neighborhoods where two of the senior citizen centers closed, said that he plans to contact the DFTA this week and ask them to reevaluate the criteria, saying a lot of seniors that go to the centers don’t take the meals at some of the centers because the quality is poor.
Meanwhile, it is not just the shuttered senior centers that will see an impact in services because of the budget cuts.
“The budgets of all the other senior centers in the city are going to be severely impacted,” said Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy at Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City.
Seniors have already felt one of the impacts of the South Jamaica Senior Center’s closing – losing an air conditioned space to go during the recent heat wave.
“The terrible part about this is we think of the South Jamaica Senior Center as a cool place, and we would stay there until it closed,” Medlock said. “These hot days that we had I really did a lot of suffering because my air condition broke.”
Alice Davis, 78, had been going to the South Jamaica Senior Center since she was 60 and said the announcement that the center was closing “really threw me for a loop.”
“It was just like family there . . . we would all enjoy spending time with each other,” Davis said.
