The best thing one can say about living in Ashfield - always! - has to do with the number of people who feel a personal commitment and a sense of caring - and real willingness to devote the endless hours it always takes to help work out ways and means of improving the quality of life for all of Ashfield's people!
This means that a tremendous burden of responsibility falls on us all, but especially on our Select Board, to exercise constant vigilance, patience and willingness to work with people from all walks of life and of all ages - and to take on a wide variety of issues and a never-ending stream of problems begging to be solved.
It means also that an equal degree of attention and willingness to become involved needs to originate in the rest of us lucky Ashfield residents! And the wonder (to me, at least, used to city ways) is how well so many of us seem to measure up to the tasks!
Situated as we are in a poor region of the state of Massachusetts up in the hills and thus far from easy access to both services and jobs, our town lacks services that are far more accessible to other communities in our region. The support available elsewhere to seniors, low income families and disabled people that can be taken for granted in many other communities is still only tangentially available in Ashfield. Ashfield House (operating from a federal (HUD) grant under private management for this mixed category) does not serve the needs of elders in the community very well, although the need for low income and handicapped is being met very well!
The projection for Ashfield's future is that we may expect a growing number of seniors in proportion to our total population. We need to provide more local services for this group, especially in terms of public housing and transportation. Already a number of seniors have had to move to outlying communities that have such services. Several of them have told us they miss Ashfield very much, and wish they could come back. These two paramount needs have been occupying the minds of our Select Board, Ashfield's Senior Council (ACS) and the Ashfield members of the Council on Aging (ACOA). All of these agencies have begun learning to work together to do the research needed to discover what is likely to work best for us.
The ACS began exploring options for housing two years ago, in several ways. A combined housing group of concerned Ashfield people that includes members of ASC and the ACOA as well as a member of the Select Board, have recently brought in two regional non-profit groups as consultants. These groups have worked with a number of communities in western Massachusetts to help them to choose and fund the services they need in the area of community housing.
Following their recommendations, a committee of four members of ASC began visiting facilities in neighboring group housing facilities in 2000 and reported back to the housing group mentioned above. Unfortunately, it turns out that only one "non-metropolitan" HUD grant was available in the state of Massachusetts in 2001. The fact that we do not have enough seniors living in Ashfield whose income falls below the cut-off level for candidacy has not been a problem for other communities locally that already have such housing, since there is never a shortage of candidates on their waiting list, drawing as they do from a wider area than just the local community - but this fact seems to have daunted at least one of our housing committee members!
The four Ashfield members of the Council on Aging have been focusing on the issue of transportation. We have recently received an offer of an FRTA (Franklin Regional Transportation Authority) Senior van, to be kept in Ashfield as the property of the town. Here's what it looks like.
The Ashfield members of the COA had been repeatedly bringing up the issue of rides for Ashfield seniors at the monthly four-town (Shelburne, Colrain, Buckland and Ashfield) Consortium meetings over the past two years, and this offer is a response to our pleas. The van is one of a fleet used by the FRTA to take seniors and others to the doctor, to the grocery store, occasionally even to a beauty parlor.
This Consortium-based system has not been working well for Ashfield seniors, partly because of real inconvenience created by the distance involved, which results in too long a day for many people. The problem is that our seniors have to be picked up first and are then dropped off last on such trips. That, and the difficulty the Consortium experiences off and on of having enough drivers and vans on hand to answer all the calls that may come in for rides has made many Ashfield seniors lose faith in the Consortium's system.
This van is the FRTA's and the Consortium's answer to Ashfield's transportation need. Its size and truck-like nature raise a serious question, however, concerning its suitability for our community. Because it is so big and technically complex, including a chair lift and several other features, the question arises as to how many are likely to use it at any one time, who will be empowered to drive it, and under what circumstances. It certainly is not likely to be used informally by members of the ASC or the ACOA to take a small group of housebound elders for a trip to a restaurant or a movie - or even just to get some fresh air and look at the fall foliage! Is it really what we need? Can it be used to drive one person at a time to a doctor's appointment, say in Hamp or in Greenfield? Or even in Burgie or Shelburne Falls? Or to bring an elder to pick up an ailing car at a local garage? It may turn out to be overkill, in the sense that it is very likely to be (at the very least) 1) expensive to run; 2) closely limited in usage by insurance restrictions; 3) necessitating a highly trained driver.