Changes to CA’s aging funding could mean less food in Los Angeles

By Maral Karakouzian, especially for CalMatters

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Every day in Los Angeles County, thousands of seniors rely on a simple but important service: food.

For some, it’s delivered to their door. For others, it is shared at a local senior center. No matter how it’s served, for many, meal services mean stability, connection, and being able to stay safe at home.

Now a proposed change how California allocates funding for these services may reduce access to them for the communities that rely on them most.

The state, through the California Department of Aging, updated its intrastate funding formula, which determines how money is shared among different local agencies. The aim is to ensure that funding meets the level of need and that it is done in a fair way across regions.

But there are real reasons for concern. The proposal prioritizes the formulated balance sheet over the operational reality on the ground.

Not all aging service regions are interchangeable. Not all systems work at the same scale. And not all communities face the same level of demand.

Los Angeles County, for example, serves approximately a quarter of California’s seniors, including one of the state’s largest populations of low-income seniors and seniors with complex needs.

In a system, these large, even modest, changes in funding can have significant consequences. The predicted impact of the proposed 17% reduction in Los Angeles County could mean nearly 186,000 fewer meals served in public places and over 157,000 fewer home-delivered meals annually.

All of this equates to about 1,300 fewer meals per day. These elderly people may lose access to food, human connection and services that help them stay healthy and independent.

So how does a formula designed to improve equity lead to such a result? The problem is not the data, but how the data is weighted.

The proposed formula takes into account age, income, disability and geography and gives these factors approximately equal weight, although not all of them drive demand for services in the same way.

Equal weighting may seem fair on paper, but it does not reflect how need manifests itself in real communities.

Older people on low incomes, for example, are much more likely to rely on publicly funded nutrition and support services. High-density urban regions like Los Angeles serve significantly more people and operate on a different scale than smaller systems.

The data also show that population growth isn’t happening evenly across the state — Los Angeles County added more than 92,000 senior adults in one year — but the proposed formula doesn’t proportionally reflect that increase.

When these realities are not reflected in the formula, funding can shift away from communities with the highest levels of need. This isn’t just about Los Angeles County; other large regions with high demand may face similar challenges.

The state has the right to update the formula. But before finalizing it, the state must test alternative scenarios and ensure the model reflects real-world demand without creating unintended consequences.

This request is not to delay progress. This is not an argument against change; this is an argument for the fix.

California has a strong commitment to helping seniors age with dignity and independence. This commitment depends on funding systems that work in practice, not just on paper.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.