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Editorial As we went to press this week, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion announced his opposition to a city plan to reorganize the Meals on Wheels program in a controversial pilot . The reorganization, slated for rollout in July only in the Bronx, would drastically reduce the number of Bronx providers of the meals and would introduce frozen meals for many seniors. This is an awful idea for so many reasons. Seniors who rely on this program depend on the occasional contact with the person delivering the meals. Getting a stack of frozen meals at the beginning of the week, as 30 percent of clients will, limits frail seniors' contact with the outside world. The plan also assumes that agencies can easily determine which seniors are capable of cooking their own meals, but that's a difficult decision that requires more casework. And as Comptroller William Thompson said this week, making that assessment and retrofitting existing vehicles to keep the food frozen, also requires enough additional spending that it cancels out the savings DFTA hoped to achieve by going with frozen food. Opposing the Bloomberg administration's plan would seem to be a no-brainer, particularly for elected officials, for whom alienating senior citizens is like stepping on a political third rail. That's why the fervent lock-step support of regular Democrats for the meals deal has raised so many eyebrows. Without any other reasonable explanation for their position, the fact that one large east Bronx agency that stands to gain under the new system - RAIN (Regional Assistance for Interim Needs) - has close political ties to borough Democrats and to the Department for the Aging (DFTA), leaves the officials open to questions of impropriety. The Norwood News reported in March that RAIN Executive Director Louis Vasquez once headed DFTA's Bronx office and that his wife was chief of staff for former Bronx County Democratic Chairman Roberto Ramirez. And according to campaign records available to the public, the Vasquezes are financial supporters of Bronx Democratic regulars. RAIN appears to be a favorite to receive contracts under the plan because, since it does not use union workers, the agency can deliver meals for $5 apiece as required by the request for proposals. Why Bronx Democrats support a plan that will leave more union workers out in the cold is a mystery. If RAIN's connections to Bronx Democrats is not the reason for the officials' support, then someone needs to do a better job explaining why they are backing this cockamamie plan. Council Member Maria Baez, who represents University Heights and chairs the Council's Aging Committee, would be the logical person to offer that explanation. It took Carrion a little while, but considering that all his political allies in the borough are on the other side of this issue, it surely was not an easy decision for him to publicly denounce the plan. The borough president deserves credit for doing the right thing. We hope Carrion's announcement and the comptroller's report help lead the way to the demise of this really bad idea.
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