Growing pains

Story by Chris Graham

Early 2010 Census projections have more than 20 percent of Rockingham County’s population in the 60-and-over category, a 20 percent jump from the 2000 Census. And it’s not like they all live just outside of the Harrisonburg city limits, either.

“No, they’re all over the county, in subdivisions outside of the city and off little country roads way out in the county,” said Cathie Galvin, the director of senior services in Harrisonburg and Rockingham for the Valley Program for Aging Services, which provides an array of human services to people 60 and older in Harrisonburg-Rockingham and throughout the Central Shenandoah Valley.

It’s tough enough for seniors who have issues with, say, transportation to the doctor’s office or grocery store, and live in a city setting. The problems multiply for those who live out of town and sometimes out of reach of the public-services infrastructure.

“One of the issues that we’re facing is we’re becoming a retirement location for people up North, people who were going to Florida and said, Isn’t this pretty, and decided to retire,” Galvin said.

“Some of those folks are used to having more public services than we have in this rural area of the state. So we’ll get calls to the office asking, Where do I catch the bus to get to the doctor’s office? And we don’t have that available in Rockingham County.

“They are used to paying a little bit higher taxes where they’re coming from, and they move here and expect to have these services, and they’re not here,” Galvin said.

An interesting growing pain for a locality to have to figure out, isn’t it?