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Washington Evening Journal
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Fairfield Community Center ends weekly meals
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FAIRFIELD – The Fairfield Community Center board is sad to report that its experiment in hosting its own weekly meals has come to an end.
In early May, the center served its first meal just a month after Milestones Area Agency on Aging served its final meal on March 27. The agency ran out of funding to maintain its four-day-a-week meals, but the Fairfield Community Center board endeavored to pick up some of the slack by serving its own meal every Wednesday.
Kathy Horn, a member of the board who had taken on the meal program, said the center served a meal for five weeks until it became apparent that the cost of the meals and regulatory burdens were too great to continue. The center does not receive money from the government, and was having to pay for the meals out of its own funds, offset by the $6 per meal it was charging.
At first, board members were preparing the food, and then it was being prepared at someone’s home. However, Horn said the board learned that it would need to certify its kitchen as SafeServ, and for a SafeServ-certified person to serve the meals. Plus, it would have to pay an annual licensing fee of $400 to the state to legally serve meals.
Horn said the board looked into catering the meals, and found that the cheapest caterer charged $9 per meal. The board was already contemplating raising the per-meal fee from $6 to $7, but that would still mean losing $2 on every meal if it went with a caterer.
“No restaurant in town could do it in our price range,” she said.
Though the weekly meals are now a thing of the past, Horn wants the public to know the Fairfield Community Center remains vibrant in a hundred other ways. It will still host free weekly bingo on Wednesdays, with popcorn and other snacks.
Three card clubs use the building weekly, and it hosts meetings of the Lions Club and PEO monthly. Indian Hills Community College has run a program from the building called “Ask a Teenager,” where 19 local high school students in the IHCC nursing program helped seniors with technology, such as helping them to use phones and computers. It also hosts meetings of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, reunions, showers and other rentals.
“We have a lot of things going on,” Horn said.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
