On Monday, December 13, Maryland State Senator Arthur Ellis took time following a special session of the state legislature to meet with Fenwick Landing Senior Care Community’s Director Karin Lakin and staff about the Waldorf Center’s dire need funding to recover from the recent Pandemic.
Larkin informed Senator Ellis that their recovery since reopening in June of this year has been difficult not only because of loss of revenue during the pandemic but also due to staff who did not return after being furloughed during the Pandemic, current relicensing of employee requirements, and higher wage costs for replacement staff and returning the day senior population to the center.
She explained that thefts of catalytic converters from the four buses in their fleet that transports their wards to the site resulted in added costs to the already heightened maintenance costs for their buses that had not moved during the 15 months of the Pandemic.
Senator Ellis offered to present their issues to the Charles County Legislative Delegation for funding requests.
Ellis explained that his role as a state senator is to represent Charles County. One of his major roles, he explained, is to seek available state funding to meet the needs of his constituents.
He also noted that his own experiences with senior care for his late mother provided him with insight into the value and needs of senior care facilities.
Larkin said that the care facility will need almost 300 thousand dollars during the next six months to fund a needed part-time nursing position, provide health insurance for their employees and increase their wage from 12.50 to 13.21 an hour in order to retain them, along with meeting higher fuel and maintenance costs and increasing security features for the building and parking lots.
She said her hope is that if they can make it through the next six months, then the number of participants will return to pre-pandemic levels and the center can again be self-sufficient.
The nonprofit senior care center had been in operation for twenty years before closing during the pandemic. Larkin said only one of their 30 residential residents died because of Covid-19 during the Pandemic, but that the resident population has only returned to 22 seniors currently and that their day program which normally hosts 45 seniors a day, currently only has 22 participants.