March 29, 2024

Elderly Nutrition program to use excess funds for meals

The Jasper County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved Jasper County Elderly Nutrition to use excess funds to purchase shelf-stable and frozen meals. The meals would be purchased using $9,300 in carryover funds that was distributed to the county.

“I would like to spend a portion of it on shelf-stable meals. We’ve done this in the past. They are meals that we can give to our clients, they can be put on a shelf and if we are closed due to weather and if they don’t have electricity and can’t use a microwave, they can pull the meals out, open the can and eat it as is,” project manager Kelli Van Manen said.

The shelf-stable meals cost $2.61 each and will be purchased from JA Foods Services in Muchanan, Mich.

She will also purchase frozen meals for the program. The frozen meals would take the place of sack lunches normally distributed for Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day and Presidents Day.

“We have never done these in the past. I can get two meals in a pack and we would get three of those and we would use those instead of our sack lunches that we send out on holidays,” Van Manen said. “It will be a little adjustment, we can’t send out five at a time because a lot of our clients wouldn’t have freezer space to do that. We have the money we might as well try that and see how it goes.”

The frozen meals will be purchased from GA Foods located in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Also approved was the designation of a section of Mission Avenue to be changed from a level “B” road to a level “C” road. The county had received requests from adjacent landowners that the road change classification, enabling the county to put up gates and keep people of the road that had been doing damage to their property.

Once reclassified, the county is no longer responsible for blading or dragging on a regular basis, snow and ice removal along with sanding and salting on a regular basis and bridges may not be maintained to carry legal loads. The shoulder, crown, repairs, uniform width and inspections will not be maintained or done on a regular basis. Gates will be purchased, installed and maintained by the county for the road.

In other business:

• The engineer’s office was approved to purchase a $95,500 motorgrader from Murphy Equipment.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com