Information about services for seniors
Boulder County Area Agency on Aging: bit.ly/2jA1ij6
Longmont Senior Services: bit.ly/2jShrnv
Boulder Senior Services: bit.ly/1rK4gSQ
Lafayette Senior Services: bit.ly/2jsdEOW
Louisville Senior Services: bit.ly/2kdMUPj
Elsewhere in Boulder County: Aging services resources consultants’ and specialists’ locations and contact information: bit.ly/2jsaZoF
Boulder County residents who are 65-and-older are projected to represent an even larger share of the county’s total population by the year 2030, says Colorado state demographer Elizabeth Garner.
In 2015, about 13 percent of the 218,174 people living in Boulder County were 65 or older, according to the State Demography Office. Of the 380,382 people that agency projects will be living in Boulder County in 2030, about 20 percent will be 65-plus, Garner said during a population-trends presentation to county staffers this week.
Statewide, and not just in Boulder County, Garner said, “We are aging, fast.”
She said the State Demography Office projects that by 2030, Colorado’s 65-and-older population will be 77 percent larger than it was in 2015, growing from 719,000 to 1.27 million.
Garner suggested that across the state, government agencies providing services, programs and other assistance for that growing population of seniors should be asking themselves: “Are we ready?”
Challenges and issues facing Boulder County and the rest of Colorado as its population ages, Garner said, include increased demands for long-term care workers, gerontologists, and doctors who will accept patients on Medicare.
According to September and October 2016 “Aging in Colorado” reports on the Demography Office’s website, one of the implications of the things the state agency has identified as a potential issue to keep an eye on will be meeting health care demands.
“The older population requires more health services, and this increase in spending creates growth within the health care industry,” the Demography Office said. “It will be important for the state, as well as individual communities, to ensure they can attract and retain a skilled work force to meet those demands.”
Another issue, the Demographer’s Office said in its online reports, will be keeping up with seniors’ housing needs.
“Housing preferences for the 65-plus depend greatly on age and disability, as well as proximity to health services and amenities, costs, transportation and family,” the office said. “If a community has a shortage of homes with accessibility features, or few public transportation options, it will have a hard time attracting and retaining the 65-plus population.”
After the state demographer’s Monday population-trends report, Boulder County Commissioner Deb Gardner said addressing the needs of “a big part Betboo of the population that’s aging ” is one of the “unique challenges” the county faces.
It’s a challenge that Boulder County and other local government and nonprofit aging-services agencies are already aware of, though, and have been “working on really hard,” said Gardner, the commissioners chairwoman.
Longmont Senior Services manager Michele Waite and Boulder County Area Agency on the Aging manager Sherry Leach noted that since 2006, a collaborative of local agencies has been following and updating a countywide strategic plan for addressing many of the challenges presented by the county’s aging population.
That “Age Well Boulder County” plan — available online at allagewell.com — includes goals for meeting such basic safety-net needs as housing, food, access to essential services and transportation.
The plan also covers such health and wellness and support for seniors who want to continue living in, and participating in, their local communities.
One of the issues the strategic plan and senior services workers try to address, Waite said, is “How can we support people to be where they want to be?”
Another issue, Waite said: “How can we support people who don’t have financial resources” to stay in their own homes if that’s what they want and are physically capable of doing, including people who do not have a support system of family, friends or neighbors?
Leach said local agencies need to plan for providing and funding services in the decades beyond 2030 — a year in which members of the post-World War II “baby boom” generation who were born in 1946 will be 84 years old, and baby boomers born in 1964 will have reached the age of 66.
That’s because they’ll soon be followed into senior-citizen status by the first group of “Gen X” — the generation of people born between 1965 and 1979 — and, eventually, “Millenials” born between 1980 and 1999.
“We really need to look at how to design service models that are effective and efficient for a long time,” Leach said, as well as figuring out “where we’ll get the money we need to provide those basic services.”
According to the State Demography Office, the 65-and-older age group is the only one of several age categories whose share of Boulder County’s population is expected to increase by 2030. Each of the other age groups’ shares of the total is expected to drop slightly.
Children age 17 and under, 20 percent of the county’s overall population in 2015, will comprise 18 percent of the population in 2030. People ages 18 to 24 will drop from 14 percent to 13 percent of the total.
Boulder County residents between the ages of 25 and 44 were 25 percent of the county’s population in 2015 and are forecast to be 24 percent by 2030. People ages 45 to 64 represented 28 percent of the county’s residents in 2015 and are expected to be 25 percent of the total in 2030.
John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc
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