Lois Brown Dale
Like the mighty Mississippi, the origin of senior-service levies in Ohio - now a rapidly rising $90 million annual enterprise - can be traced bck to a small, unlikely source. For the river, it's little Lake Itasca in the woods of northern Minnesota; for the levy, it's 88 - year-old Lois Brown Dale of the tiny town of Milford in rural Clermont County, Ohio.
Lois was a Clermont County Administrative Assistant in 1967 when the idea first bubbled in her had that perhaps money for senior services could be raised the same way that it was raised for mental health and mental retardation services - through a county-wide property-tax levy.
However, she was told, such a levy would require an act of legislation from the Ohio General Assembly, and local politicians and owers-that-be were not encouraging. "Keep quiet and forget it, you're never going to get it passed," she remembers being told by one political official in the early going.
But people like Lois don't need much encouragement - only time, in this case, 12 years. "Oh, I've always been a meddler," Lois recalls, only half-joking of her motivation almost 40 years ago. "I'd been active in the community with United Appeal and was working for the county commissioners, seeing how levies worked for other social services, and it just seemed that I was "in the right place at the right time". Sometimes situations present themselves, out of the blue, and there you are in a position to do something about it. And, I've always liked to meddle."
So, the enegetic wife of a business consultant and mother of three kept working away on the idea, first to obtain funding to assist older persons in Clermont County in need of rural transportation services, and later to help fund centers for senior services that were scattered amont the county's churches and American Legion and VFW facilities in Milford, Bethel, Williamsburg and New Richmond.
Still having no luck at the local level, and "a lot of walking on eggs" about politics, Lois got the support of Martin Janis, then - director of the Ohio Commission on Aging. She organized busloads of older Ohioans to attend the commission-sponsored 1979 Ohio Governor's Conference on Again, and, with Janis's help, led them in petitioning then - Governor Jim Rhodes to assist in passing a law to allow countywide senior service levies.
Ever the-politician and ever the-loyal friend, Rhodes saw the point of his old buddy, Janis, and his constituents, and realied the logic in letting others raise taxes for him. "I was getting no help from the legislature," Lois recollects, "then Jim Rhodesput the squeeze on them and the law was passed that year, in 1979, just like that."
In 1980, Clermont County put its first senior-service levy on the ballot and saw it defeated by 1,000 votes. *Defeated again by 600 votes in 1981. In 1982, undeterred, Lois and her supporters took the levy back to the voters and finally won approval of a .5 mill levy that brought in $543,700 to help set up services for those needing transportation to and from medical appointments and to fund hearing-loss programs at the county's four senior centers. The levy hasn't failed since and tody raises some $4 million, annually.
Across the state, other counties gradually followed Lois's lead. Today, 59 of Ohio's 88 counties are collectively raising in excess of $90 million a year via senior-service levies.
Lois has been quick to downplay her monumental role in making it possible to raise so much money for so many older Ohioans in great need of the valuable services procured via senior levies throughout the state.
I was of that generation where you did what was expected of you, and more if you could," lois explains. "Maybe others didn't expect me to do certain things, but I expected it of myself. And, like I said, I always liked to meddle."
Written by Mike Payne for Scripps Gerontology Center
*Note - As I went through Mama's notes/papers on Clermont Senior Services leview - I think they lost the first two levies and finally won on the third try. (I'll double-check). Karen Kelly
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