Aurora staffers blame demise of adult special needs program on staffing, VA reimbursement troubles

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AURORA | Aurora’s City Council demurred on taking steps to restart the Morning Star Adult Day Program on Monday, instead offering early support for a community needs assessment targeting older adults.

Established by a community task force more than 30 years ago, the Morning Star Adult Day Program offered meals, activities and some health care services to adults over the age of 55 suffering from memory disorders and other health problems. Caregivers and families leaned on the program to help keep loved ones out of long-term care facilities.

Like many facilities that catered to older adults, Morning Star shut its doors with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parks, Recreation & Open Space Department director Brooke Bell told the council on Monday that staffers kept in touch with the families of clients for about a year, checking up on them and supplying meals to 11 households.

But families and even some city officials say they were kept out of the loop when the final decision was made to terminate the program. Staffers broke the news at a January meeting of the Aurora Commission for Older Adults, prompting the chair of the commission as well as councilmember Angela Lawson to demand answers from staffers at a January council meeting.

On Monday, city manager Jim Twombly apologized to the council for not including them in the discussion about ending the program, saying the city knew in May 2021, when the Aurora Center for Active Adults reopened, that continuing the program would be a challenge.

“It didn’t make it to council discussions over the summer or in the budget workshop, and it has languished, kind of, since that time,” Twombly said. “That discussion really should have taken place six or eight months ago.”

Bell said some of the challenges faced by Morning Star prior to COVID-19 included staffing, specifically filling part-time and seasonal positions for certified nursing assistants, as well as “lagging” reimbursements from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, with payments falling behind by years.

She said an average of 14-17 people attended the program each day over the past decade. The program cost around $440,000 each year but theoretically broke even with reimbursements. Bell estimated that restarting the program would cost an additional $165,000, in part to increase wages to attract medical staff.

Council members split on the idea of ​​restarting the program, with Lawson calling it “one-of-a-kind,” while Mayor Mike Coffman and Francoise Bergan questioned whether the need that Morning Star filled wouldn’t be met better by the private sector .

“This is just a waste of taxpayer dollars,” Coffman said. “There’s a reason why we’re maybe the only one in the country doing it.”

Bergan also said she was uncomfortable with the idea of ​​city-run health care services and the fact that those services were based in a single ward. Councilmember Alison Coombs argued in favor of restarting Morning Star, stressing how important it was for families to trust providers of respite care.

“The families that are going to this program are families that have been going there for a while,” Coombs says. “It’s easy to treat these programs as interchangeable, but they are not necessarily.”

“This is a program that a lot of our seniors have connected on,” Lawson said.

Council members did not oppose an assessment of the needs of older adults in Aurora moving forward. However, while Coombs, Lawson, Juan Marcano, Ruben Medina and Crystal Murillo said they supported restarting the program, they did not garner enough support to move an item forward from the study session.

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