The $600,000 Hamilton County spends yearly on legal services for senior citizens dwarfs what other Ohio counties budget for similar legal assistance.
''Wow. Wow,'' said Judie Lane, assistant director of the Columbus-
based Central Ohio Area on Aging. Her agency, which serves Franklin County, sets aside $68,000 a year for legal aid for seniors.
The story is the same in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County, which budgets $90,000 annually for legal work. In Toledo's Lucas County, the amount is $90,076.
''I'd like to have that money,'' said Billie Johnson, director of the Area Office on Aging of Northwestern Ohio Inc. in Toledo. That agency gets $1.3 million a year from a senior services levy. None of it goes toward legal services.
''The needs here are meals, in-home care, transportation and respite,'' Ms. Johnson said. ''Maybe the needs there (in Hamilton County) are different.''
Or maybe Hamilton County is better at meeting the legal needs of its older population, counters Tim Fogarty, president of the PRO Seniors Board of Trustees.
PRO Seniors, a downtown legal aid agency created in 1975 to handle legal services for the elderly, has received the $600,000 taxpayer-funded contract since July, 1993. The contract represents 5 percent of the $12.5 million the Council on Aging receives from its senior services levy.
PRO Seniors was blasted this week in an audit released by Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes, which found the agency misspent $70,512 of the $600,000.
Typically, PRO Seniors recovers money for seniors who think Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security has cheated them by not paying, in many cases, hospital bills.
In 1996, PRO Seniors recovered $2 million for its clients, Mr. Fogarty said.
''Our phone doesn't stop ringing,'' he said. ''If other counties spend less, I don't know if that is necessarily good or necessarily bad.
''If Cuyahoga County spends that little, I would suspect the legal needs of the indigent elderly there are not being met,'' Mr. Fogarty said.
In Cuyahoga, Franklin and Lucas counties, legal aid agencies for the poor help cover the cost of elderly legal needs. That is not the case in Hamilton County, where PRO Seniors deals with all legal needs of the county's 35,000 poor senior citizens.
Bob Logan, director of the Council on Aging, said the county referred to the federal Older Americans Act when determining how much it would spend on legal services.
''Back then, 5 percent seemed right. Maybe it's too much. All I can say is right now we're taking a close look at how much we're spending on all our services.''
