Monday 6/19/2023
Went for the benchmark walk first thing. Felt fine. Foot is back to normal, yay.
At 10:30 it was time for the monthly Event Coordinators meeting, to settle the calendar of events for July. It went fine, no big surprises.
Following lunch I went down to FOPAL and processed 5 boxes of donations. Some interesting things to sell. Hopcroft and Ullman, Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata is a well-known college textbook on computer science, and a first edition of that from 1969 showed up. According to Bookfinder it isn’t valuable, but I think anyone shopping the Computer section at the FOPAL sale will appreciate it. The same box had other textbooks from that period. Besides those, none of which are especially valuable, I turned up half a dozen other books valued over $30 for the “high value” box.
Back home, entered all the events from the draft July calendar in the Google sheet shared by the A/V team, and sent an email suggesting times we can meet. Then it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, where the CEO talks to the residents. I was going to join it on Zoom, but the IT STAFF running the zoom had screwed up the audio. I could see exactly what they had done wrong, but no way to tell them. So I went down to the physical meeting.
Rhonda’s main concern is a bill in committee at the State Assembly which would raise the minimum wage for “health care workers” to $25/hour. Unfortunately as written, it defines “health care worker” as anyone who works in a facility with skilled nursing. Not just nurses, everybody, dining services, janitorial, housekeeping, every position. Rhonda estimates that if passed as currently written this will increase Channing House costs by $600,000 per year, or a 3-5% increase in our monthly fees. She points out that a lot of elder facilities outside of Silicon Valley and LA, depend on MediCal reimbursement for their payroll and that is set at $19/hour. Without a corresponding increase in MediCal a number of elder facilities would be forced out of business.
She had written a letter to the Assembly members on resident’s behalf, and read it off the screen for us. There was some debate from the floor about whether Channing House could or should claim to be speaking for all residents. Rhonda agreed and said, how about if I change it to “the below-signed residents” and if you agree, you can sign it at the front desk. So after the meeting there was a line of us at the desk, signing the letter.
Codgerville 