Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Older Adults Committee, Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Place: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Virginia
Length: 55m (video)
Official meeting video (Fairfax County): https://video.fairfaxcounty.gov/player/clip/4277
Official Board of Supervisors page (Fairfax County): https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/boardofsupervisors/

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-26. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:05] All right, we're going to get started in just a minute here. All right, I'll call this meeting of the Board of Supervisors Older Adults Committee to order.

[00:00:23] Welcome, everybody. I did want to welcome, we do have some members of our Commission on Aging here, as usual. Thank you very much for being here. We do have a couple of folks that aren't going to be in attendance today, or at least one.

[00:00:41] But we do have one topic with a presentation, and I expect some good Q&A from board members. So at this point, who do I turn it over to? To Michael Beckett, to our director of DFS?

[00:01:00] Okay. All right. Great. Let's do that. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. Super Rosa Alcorn, members of the board. Michael Beckett is the Department of Family Services director. The department is happy to present the results of the community assessment survey for older adults.

[00:01:16] I'm here to provide some moral support and answer questions about the broader sort of perspective of the department on community engagement in the event that that's necessary. So I'm going to turn it over to Beth Ann Margetta and John Rutynoski. Thank you. Thank you, Director Beckett.

[00:01:35] And good morning, Chair Alcorn, Chairman McKay, Board of Supervisors. My name is Beth Ann Margetta. I'm Assistant Program Manager with the Fairfax Area Agency on Aging. It's great to see you all again. When last we met in June of this year, we provided an annual update of the Shape the Future of Aging plan implementation.

[00:01:55] We announced that the Community Assessment Survey of Older Adults was launching that week and that we would return to give a presentation on the results. Those results are in and the day has come. Excuse me. I will next turn the presentation over to John Rusynoski, DFS Data Analytics, and after his portion, I will speak to some of the next steps before we move on to discussion.

[00:02:19] So with that, take it away, John. All right. Thank you very much. And I'm very happy to be here with you today to talk about the needs of older adults in our community. I'm going to walk you through a summary of the findings of the Community Assessment Survey for Older Adults, or we'll refer to it as the CASAWA, which was administered for us by the National Research Center at POLCO, who has been our partner for this project since 2019. This is a presentation of POLCO's report. A copy of the full report will be made available to you afterwards. I want to emphasize that this survey is step one in a multilayered approach to understanding the needs of our community, and that there will be multiple

[00:02:59] public input sessions that will follow to review and explore the results, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later on in the program. So the COSOA survey instrument and the way it's administered are standardized to ensure high-quality survey methods and to make sure the results are statistically valid and comparable across all communities that administer the COSOA.

[00:03:21] Fairfax County administered the survey in 2019 and 2022. In 2026, we were given the opportunity to add some additional custom questions, which we hadn't had a chance to do before. In June of 2026, 22,000 surveys were mailed to a random sample of households with a high likelihood of containing someone over the age of 50. These households first received a half-page postcard inviting them to complete the survey online and then it was followed by a mailed hard copy survey packet which included a cover letter, a copy of the questionnaire, and a postage paid returned

[00:03:57] envelope. 1,784 of these surveys were returned. Due to a national trend in decreased responses from surveys, like mailed-out surveys, such as this. And you can see on the slide that this applies to Fairfax. In 2026, Polko offered communities who administer the COSOA the opportunity to also use an open survey link that could be shared with our partners to increase the reach of the survey. From the beginning of the planning in 2026, Fairfax County opted to add this distribution method to the 2026 survey. The open survey was launched in July of 2026,

[00:04:35] was open for about three to four weeks and generated an additional 1,260 responses. That means in total, we received 3,044 responses across all methods. As you can see on this slide in 2022, there was a comparable total of about 2,919.

[00:04:54] So we have about a similar sample size for each year. I will also add the survey was available in 10 different languages, English, Spanish, Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, simplifies, Urdu, Talegu, Farsi, Persian, and Amaric.

[00:05:09] And it was all on the card here if people wanted to get a survey in that language. And also, if they didn't have a website, there was a landing page where they could select a language. Okay. Next slide, please. In many surveys like this, some populations respond to the survey in a lower proportion than you see in county demographics.

[00:05:33] For Fairfax County in 2026, these were renters versus owners, non-white respondents compared to respondents who identified as white, non-Hispanic as opposed to those who did not identify as Hispanic, men, and the youngest of our age groups, which is 50 to 64.

[00:05:53] You can see that the trends in these response rates, what it's showing you is the percentage that's different from the population percentage. So for renters, they responded to the survey in a 12% less than there was in the total population in 2019.

[00:06:10] But for both renters and non-whites, in the three times that we've done the survey, we're getting closer to the population percentage. So we're doing a better job reaching those populations in our outreach. On the bottom of this slide, males, there was no difference in 2019, but -- and each survey there's been fewer and fewer males responding, and the same thing with the lowest age group, 15 percent, then 25, then 35 -- 33 percent for the lowest age group.

[00:06:40] So this means that in future surveys we're going to need to do a little bit more intentional targeting of these age groups. Now, even though these populations, even though some of the respondents differ from county population, the data in the report reflects county demographics because it's been weighted, so the underrepresented groups in the sample are adequately represented in the data.

[00:07:07] However, we are aware that the survey respondents were not fully representative of county demographics. But as we said before, remember the survey is only one piece of data that will be considered when developing the next Shape the Future of Aging plan, and there will be an upcoming community engagement process designed to make sure that all the voices in the community are heard and incorporated into the next iteration of the plan.

[00:07:30] Next slide, please. So Polko's report also looked at the results by some of these same categories and analyzed which of them experienced significantly more challenges. This analysis is counting the number of community livability topics.

[00:07:48] There are 17 of them. in which respondents from the specified groups reported they had challenges at a significantly higher rate. So for renters in 2022, they had significantly higher challenges in 11 out of those 17 areas. In 2026, it was 14. As you can see, some of the groups that had more challenges were also the underrepresented renters, non-white and Hispanic. But at the bottom of the slide, It was actually females, and it was only one area, and that was housing, in which they had more challenges.

[00:08:21] And it was actually the oldest age group, 75 plus, that had more challenges as opposed to the younger topics, to the younger, older adults. And although it's not on the slide, because I will point out, you only go back to 2022, because Polko did the analysis at a different level, and we don't have this exact number from the 2019 survey.

[00:08:46] In 2022, we also have some other demographic categories, which we haven't had in previous slides. We have one of the new questions that we added was about disability. So we now have data on the older adult population with disability, and we can look at these results.

[00:09:03] And that's some further analysis we're going to have in the future about both look at disability and then LGBT+, because we have a population size, which we never had before, that's responded there. So we have two other ways of cutting the data that we haven't had in the past.

[00:09:20] All right, next slide, please. Let me explain a little about the architecture of the survey going forward that will help you understand some of the results we're going to talk about. The Polco has set up the questions into six big buckets that they call the domains of community livability.

[00:09:38] They're on the left on this slide. Community design, employment and finances, equity and inclusivity, health and wellness, information and assistance, and productive activities. Each of those domains is broken down into one of 17 community livability topics.

[00:09:55] Those are the topics that we showed the challenges in the previous slide. For example, community design is housing, land use, and mobility. Within each of those topics, then you have questions. There are two main types of questions. There are ratings of community livability. Those are questions that you answer excellent, good, fair, or poor about something in the community.

[00:10:16] When I show you a percentage, it's going to be the percentage of people who said excellent or good. On the challenges, there are also challenge questions. Those are questions where we ask if something was a major, minor, or moderate, major, moderate, or minor problem or no problem.

[00:10:36] When you see a percentage of those, those are the percentage of people who said it was a major, minor, or moderate problem. The slide shows you the community livability topics and the domains, crosswalked with the shape areas in the shape plan, and then the Fairfax County strategic plan outcome areas.

[00:10:59] And as you can see, there's a fairly good correspondence between the community livability topics and the strategic plan outcome areas. They line up very well with the Fairfax County strategic plan. All right, next slide, please.

[00:11:17] We're now going to look at some of the individual questions. This is the overall community quality area, which is an additional domain that we have questions on. We're going to look at each of these items in two ways.

[00:11:34] We're going to look at it as a trend at how it has been answered all three times we did the survey, and then we're going to look at it as a benchmark. To better provide context for the survey data, resident responses for the region were compared to Polco's National Benchmark Database on Older Adult Opinion.

[00:11:54] The benchmarking database includes responses from more than 50,000 older adults in up to 589 communities across the nation that took the COSOA. In 2022, when we last did this, there were only 322 communities and 35,000 older adults.

[00:12:14] So there were fewer, less competition in this area. And then, spoiler alert, I think we did better compared to these other communities in 2026, and we'll talk about that later. So starting with the top question of an overall community quality, this is the percentage of people who rated Fairfax County as an excellent or good place to live.

[00:12:37] 87% of the respondents said Fairfax County was an excellent or good place to live. It is down slightly, but not significantly from 2022. When you look at the benchmark, 87% puts us at 174 out of the 589 communities who ask this question.

[00:12:56] It is above the national benchmark, but not significantly above, but still a very good result in terms of how people view this community. The next question is those who were asked about Fairfax County as a place to retire. This is lower at 56%.

[00:13:13] However, this is a metric that has been going up every time we have administered this survey. It was 49% in 2019, it's 53% in 22, and now it's 56%. This has been going up every time and is, I think, a bright spot we want to highlight, especially given, and we'll see this later, some of the other assessments of the community as having a high cost of living and having high, low affordable housing.

[00:13:46] Those things have persisted, but the rating of Fairfax County as a place to retire is gone up. And the benchmark side, it is 452 out of the 589 communities.

[00:14:01] It is lower than the national benchmark, but again, still not significantly lower. It's not an optimal result, but it's trending in the right direction. Finally, the bottom line is the community, whether or not people planned to stay here throughout retirement.

[00:14:20] 61% planned to stay here at retirement. It's kind of gone up and down over time. There's not a clear trend. And this was significantly below the benchmark at 284 out of 290 communities, although slightly better than it was in 2022 when it was literally the bottom at 87 out of 87.

[00:14:40] So there's been some improvement there. There's one other question in this group that's not on the slide, and that's whether people would recommend retiring in Fairfax, and that's higher at 66%. So what's interesting is that 56% say it's a good or excellent place to retire. 61%, a higher percentage say they plan to stay here, and an even higher percent, 66%, would recommend living here.

[00:15:03] So this is a question I think we're going to get some more information on when we go through the community engagement process to try to tease out the difference between those. Next slide, please. Now we're going to look at some results for some individual rating questions and then look at some trends and then look at some benchmarks.

[00:15:25] This, if you took all the questions, all the rating questions, and just sort of put them in order of highest to lowest, these are some of the highest rated questions. As you can see, in 2026, they are largely mental health, physical health, and recreation items.

[00:15:41] It's mental health and emotional well-being, the respondents' physical health, safety in your community, park and recreation opportunities, overall quality of life, and the quality of natural environment. These are some of the things that Fairfax County's respondents gave the highest ratings to.

[00:15:58] Next slide, please. On the bottom end, as I mentioned earlier, cost of living is the lowest rated at 14%, followed by affordable and accessible housing at 20% and 18%, and then quality and variety of employment opportunities at 26% and 24%, and then variety of housing opportunities.

[00:16:16] Again, understanding the national trends and what's been happening in this region with employment. it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. The next slide, please. Now we're looking at the challenges. And this is at the community livability topic, the 17 topic level. This is an analysis that Polko does that looks at the number of people who are experiencing these challenges. I didn't put all 17 topics on the slide. This is just the topic and the bottom. So the most challenges were reported

[00:16:52] by people in the topic areas of information, accessibility, and housing, and then physical health and health care. The bottom end, where they had the fewest challenges, were independent living, equity, and safety. Now, you may remember health care is one of the highest rated items, so why is it also the one that reports the most challenges?

[00:17:15] There are different types of questions. The challenge question is asking you, the respondent, if they experience challenges in this area whereas the rating topic is asking people how they feel about services or maybe about their own physical health. What it tells me is that while Fairfax County residents, older adults face many physical health and health care challenges, they feel very positive about the services that are available to address those issues in Fairfax County. Next slide please. Now we're going to start looking at some trends. This I'm backing out all the way to the six domain areas.

[00:17:53] This is an analysis that Polco does that looks at these domains, it turns it into what they call a community readiness index, and it looks at all those over time. As you can see, everything except community design, which remember was housing, mobility, and land use, went down in 2022 and then rebounded again in 2026.

[00:18:19] They call this a COVID dip that's happened in many, many communities, and overall, it shows that we're heading in the right direction with respect to overall community readiness for assisting older adults to remain or become active community participants in Fairfax County, according to Polko.

[00:18:39] Next slide, please. Now we're just going to go through some trends, some other trends. Everything from this point on in the survey, in the presentation, is going to be looking at individual question levels. There were 52 assessments of community livability questions that could be compared over time.

[00:19:01] If you just go back to 2022, the ratings between 2022 and 2026 were similar for 49 of those 52 items. Three were lower, and again, they're things we've talked about. overall economic health of the community, and both the variety of employment opportunities and quality of employment opportunities. On the challenge side, there were 42 questions, and all of them were statistically similar to 2022. So while there's not been a great deal of movement on individual question level since 2022, we can take a look with a wider lens at how some

[00:19:37] of the responses have changed over all three surveys since we can go back to 2019 and we have a trend. So these next two tables show some questions that have demonstrated positive trends and some opportunities for improvement over the last three surveys. For example, people who felt very or somewhat informed about available services and activities in the community has gone from 49 to 52 to 57 percent. That's a very positive result considering that information accessibility, as we showed on a previous slide, is one of the highest challenge areas for

[00:20:13] folks. So I think this reflects some positive movement, and we know from the Shape the Future of Aging Plan that they've put a lot of work into the information accessibility issues, and they've done, and I think this is showing some positive results from that.

[00:20:34] Openness and acceptance of the community to older results with diverse background also gone up not very highly between 22 and 26, but it's one of the ones that has improved every time. On the opportunity side, opportunities to enroll in skill building and personal enrichment classes has dropped every time, as has the respondents' assessment of the availability of long-term care options. Another response, we have questions about that I think we want to dig into a little bit more. Next slide. These are challenge trends, and just to remind you want to see people have fewer challenges as opposed to a higher rating. So we are seeing

[00:21:13] fewer people having an issue finding meaningful volunteer work or maintaining a healthy diet. There were also a couple other questions in there that are not on the slide that we have fewer people who have trouble finding interesting recreational or cultural activities or having interesting social events or activities. On the other side, we've seen more people who see that they have an issue. They're concerned about being a victim of a fraud or a scam. That's something that I know the board has been interested in. That's gone up a little bit every time. And again, this is how much of a problem is this for you? And it's a major, minor, or moderate problem.

[00:21:52] And so it's up to 23%. The other two, finding work in retirement and building skills for paid or unpaid work are two others that we've seen rising over the time. Okay. Next slide is going to be looking, instead of our trends now, we're going to look at the benchmarks. There were 52 rating questions that were compared to Polco's benchmark database. Of the rating questions, 12 of them were significantly above the benchmark and only one was lower. The one that was lower

[00:22:27] was cost of living in our community. Compare that to 2022, when only three were higher and two were lower. So we look better in the aggregate compared to those. Some of the places where Fairfax County rated higher, overall economic health of the community, opportunities to build work skills, overall quality of the transportation system, overall health and wellness opportunities, and overall opportunities for education, culture, and the arts. On the challenge side, it was a similar story there were eight areas where we had fewer challenges than than on the

[00:23:03] national benchmarks and none where we had higher um three four years ago there were two where we were lower and none where we were higher and those are um fairfax county residents have older adults have fewer challenges having money to get daily expenses getting the health care they need maintaining a healthy diet having interesting recreation or cultural activities and having interesting social events or activity to attend. All right. Next slide, please. All right. In addition to the rating questions and the challenge questions, there were another category of questions that ask older adults about the frequency that they do certain activities. And these are

[00:23:42] just a couple of things I wanted to pull out that I thought was significant to share with you. 91% of older adults said they voted in the last election. And that's a remarkable amount of civic engagement in this population. 57% volunteer their time at least once a week. On the caregiving side, 22% provide care to a child under 18 at least one day a week, and 37% provide care to someone who's 55 or older. On the digital connectivity issue, this is the percentage who did this

[00:24:18] at least a few times a week. 96% of older adults use the internet from a computer. at least once a week, several times a week, 95% use the internet from a cell phone, 98% check email, 70% use social media, and 52% shop online. It just shows, again, the level of connectivity and engagement in the community in Fairfax County. Finally, the last slide. One thing that Polko always wants to report in this is the fact that older adults make significant contributions,

[00:24:54] both paid and unpaid, to the communities in which they live. In addition to their paid work, older adults contributed to the economy through volunteering, providing informal help to friends and family, and caregiving. So one of the aims of the CASO is to document that contribution.

[00:25:10] So Polko takes these contributions of older adults in Fairfax County using the sort of the wage estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the number of hours per week that survey respondents said they do these activities. and they come up with this figure in 2026 that there is $19 billion in economic activity generated by older adults in Fairfax County. $7 billion of that is unpaid, which comes from caregiving and volunteering, $12 billion from total employment. And as you can see, comparing to 2022, it's gone

[00:25:43] up from 16.6, and most of that is in the unpaid as opposed to the paid work. I will say that this is slightly higher than the increase in inflation over that time. So even beyond inflation, older adults are making a greater contribution to the economy in Fairfax County. Next slide, please.

[00:26:06] So the next steps in this process is that we will review the COSOA data with the Commission on Aging and the SHAPE Initiative VELB committees to identify gaps that will inform the community engagement phase the community engagement sessions will be held to gather quality qualitative data to inform the next strategic plan they will endeavor to have one public engagement session in each of the magisterial districts and we'll obviously work with your offices to to help set those up and there will be one held on november 13th 2026 at the aaa's 50th anniversary session

[00:26:44] All of this input then from the survey and the sessions will be analyzed and synthesized to inform the next strategic plan, which is set to begin in 2028. And next time you have the pleasure of people coming to this meeting is June 2027, when the next annual report from the SHAPE plan is been made.

[00:27:08] That is the presentation on the Kosoa data. Do you have any questions? Yeah, John, thank you very much. Yeah, there's one more slide, but let's wait until the discussion. But thank you very much. Very comprehensive. Some of the findings I find surprising.

[00:27:26] Many of them I don't. Right. But I think that's very helpful. And there are a couple things that I'll come back to whenever we talk about future topics. I think this does help inform as well some of the future topics for this committee. At this point, I'll turn it over to Chairman McKay.

[00:27:45] Yeah, thank you, Supervisor Alcorn. And I agree with you. I think many of the topics in here are highly predictable. And the fact that the numbers haven't changed shows you that, you know, in a lot of these categories, some of the same challenges are here, but also some of the same great opportunities.

[00:28:04] And, you know, the safety one is always one that, you know, is looked at heavily because whether we like it or not, That's the one where the statistics regularly get skewed in the media and on social media and, you know, in talking with some of our seniors trying to, or older adults, trying to understand what's actually going on in the community and how that forms people's opinion.

[00:28:30] These numbers are positive, showing that most people realize that this is a very safe place to live. I guess one of the questions I have, and obviously the affordable housing one, is why we spend so much time on affordable housing. I mean, that's critical.

[00:28:46] It's shown in these numbers for older adults, but I would guess that those same concerns over affordable housing are for everyone in the county. And that's one I think it doesn't matter who you're surveying. Whether you're surveying younger families or older, you probably have the same result.

[00:29:03] But the question that I have, and one that perplexes me a little bit, and maybe it's just misreading it, When I look on slide nine, under the fewest challenges reported by category, I see 6% independent living, which is a very low number.

[00:29:20] And then I'm trying to reconcile that with what is on page 11, which is availability of long-term care options at 36%. So help me understand a little bit more about what's going on there.

[00:29:36] And I've personal experience, recent experience with this, trying to find long-term care options in this community is extraordinarily difficult. Yet I'm seeing a very low 6% number on independent living.

[00:29:52] So I'm trying to understand how those might relate to each other and what your hypothesis is on how big of a challenge is that and, you know, what more can be done in that area. So this is the difference between sort of the way these two questions are reported.

[00:30:15] I kind of said that with the health care options. This slide is showing the number of people who have an issue with independent living. So it's the lowest frequency total of number of older adults who have an issue with independent living.

[00:30:32] But when they're asked the rating, one of the two questions they're asked is whether or not the availability of long-term care options, and that rating is going down. So it's a smaller proportion of older adults that have an issue compared to all the other challenges that they have, but we're seeing their assessment of those options decline over time.

[00:30:58] And it is – does that make sense? It does. I'm just, when we say having an issue, is it presumed that those are people that have long-term care and have an issue with that, or can that also be construed as the issue is they can't find long-term care?

[00:31:14] Right. Because in each of the areas they're asked certain, this is based on their answer to certain challenge questions. So if they have a challenge, they have answered a question here saying that they have a challenge in that area.

[00:31:30] So it doesn't ask them if they have assisted living, I mean, independent living, but they respond to that question that they have a challenge. Okay. Because to me, that's still an area that, you know, I think is a huge challenge. And people I talk to find it to be one of the biggest challenges with, in some cases, even being able to stay in this area.

[00:31:50] And so, you know, I think that's something we need to keep a close eye on. And then lastly, and I know we didn't go to the last slide, But I would just say that, you know, the concerns that I'm hearing from older adults in particular about the impacts of H.R.1 are not seen in any of this data yet because many of these people have not experienced what it feels like to lose health care, to lose long term care.

[00:32:18] And I would suspect just as your chart shows a COVID dip and recovery that we better, you know, I think all of us know we're bracing ourselves for that same thing because many of these effects, not only are they not being experienced now, won't show up in polling data potentially for years to come.

[00:32:39] And I think it's smart to have that on as a future topic and be paying attention to that because I think it is going to have a profound effect on a lot of our residents in the county and probably a disproportionate effect on older adults that are here. And then the last comment that I did want to make is the one with people who plan to stay in the community throughout retirement.

[00:33:02] And, you know, that number, as you pointed out, you know, is stable at 61 percent. But, you know, it's kind of a double-edged sword in a lot of ways, because on one hand, you want as many people to stay in our community throughout retirement as possible.

[00:33:18] But I think we also have to acknowledge that we live in a pretty, still a pretty high income area with a high percentage of people that have retirement benefits. And because of that, they're in a financial place where relocation might be an option for them strategically.

[00:33:34] And we saw this during COVID. We saw people who could reduce their affordability by moving to another area. They had the resources and assets to be able to do that. So it is a double-edged sword. I mean, we have a lot of folks who have lived in this community for a long time and have accumulated wealth. And with that wealth, in some cases, comes an opportunity for a strategic decision.

[00:33:54] So I don't see that number necessarily as an overall inherent negative, even though we would like to see a much higher percentage of our folks staying in the community. We have also built a community where mobility is an option for a lot of folks, and there are places in this country where that's not the case.

[00:34:11] I mean, there are parts of rural Virginia where if you wanted to relocate, you don't have a choice or even an opportunity financially to be able to do that. And so I just point that out as kind of a double-edged sword as we're looking at these numbers, just my interpretation of it. But really appreciate the work that's been done and most particularly the work that you're doing to try to make sure that these surveys are a fair reflection based on the demographics of our community.

[00:34:38] Because you could skew these results in any way you wanted if you didn't put the hard work in into making sure that all the diverse voices of our county get heard and recognized through this process. and I appreciate that. Chairman McKay, I do think that we'll go back and do a bit more of a deeper dive on the independent living question and the comparison to the long-term care availability.

[00:35:02] I think that there's some additional information that we can draw from the data and provide back to the board. Yeah, I appreciate that because it is a real challenge that we hear a lot about and that's one of the reasons why the conversations and the other things that will happen after this will probably help illuminate that.

[00:35:18] So I appreciate that. Great. Thank you, Dr. Beckett. The first hand I saw was up here, so we'll just go right down the line. Supervisor Smith. A question about languages. You listed so many different languages the survey is in. Do you know what languages people took it in and how many people took it in those other languages you listed?

[00:35:38] That is not in the data that Polko gave me, but we can certainly find out from them, obviously. Then they gave us a data file that had everything, obviously, all in one, but I don't have a field that says the language that it was taken in, so I will follow up on that and get that information.

[00:36:03] Thank you. I appreciate that. Supervisor Herdy. Yeah, a couple of questions. I'll start with slide two. pretty significant drop in both years from 2019 in terms of the mailed survey responses from 2019, almost 5,000 to 3,000 to 2,000.

[00:36:27] Do we have any feel for why we're not getting the responses? From talking to Polko, a couple of things. From talking to Polko and also doing our other surveys, because we do a DFS does a customer engagement survey that we also physically mail out and over time we're seeing similar trends and we've heard from Polko nationally that this is uh that just mail out surveys are having a lower and lower response rate which is why they gave every they gave all the communities this open survey option because they're aware that there's um that it's

[00:37:05] just becoming harder to reach people through the direct physical mail surveys. Do the crosstabs show any significant differences between the 1784 that are the statistically valid mailed in and the 1260 that we went out and solicited?

[00:37:27] We haven't had a chance to dive in at that level, but I am definitely, that's something that we're planning to do. I mean, this is, we have that data from Polko, but we just haven't had an opportunity yet to do that. But absolutely, we want to take a look at the overall numbers, although when you compare the years demographically, are very similar, even if you look down at the magisterial district level, making sure, we want to make sure that all of our open survey responses don't come from, you know, the handful of magisterial district.

[00:38:03] It doesn't look like that based on the data, but until we have a chance to sort of dive in and look at it, we won't. Yeah, it kind of takes away the statistic validity of the survey, I think, to some degree. But if you're not getting responses and you don't get enough responses, it's not statistically valid. I will say what Polko wrote in the report was that the overall survey, its margin of error is plus or minus 1.8% based on the 1784.

[00:38:33] But when you add the open participation results, it's likely that the precision would be even greater and the margin of error is smaller because you have that additional sample size. Slide nine, this is one of those ones that didn't make sense to me, like the chairman's question.

[00:38:54] Info access, you know, I looked in on page 14 where 96% use the Internet, 95% use the Internet on their phone, 98% reply to email, and info access is kind of – can you define info access?

[00:39:15] Those two just kind of seem at odds with each other when you've got access to the Internet. The questions that feed into that sort of overall information that access challenges are having adequate information on dealing with public programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and then another question on not knowing what services are available to older adults in your community.

[00:39:40] So collectively, those two make up what the challenges are. Okay, so it's more availability of information. Right. Okay. I thought it was more talking about the other, so that helps me a lot.

[00:39:56] You know, and I will maybe jump ahead to the last slide as well that wasn't covered. But what I didn't see anywhere in the survey, and I was surprised, was transportation is a challenge. And maybe, well, I was, so I'll ask the question in the thing and then go to the last slide, because I think transportation might need to be one of those things that we did.

[00:40:22] Was there anything that we mobility is just I hear that a lot. Yeah. Mobility is one of the it wasn't one of the highest or, you know, we should. So it's in the middle. Yeah, it's in the middle. It's in there. But there is and I can I can tell you where it is on the list.

[00:40:38] It's going to take me a second to find it. But on slide 13 under the higher than national benchmark. overall quality of the transportation system in your community. Is that where you were, Logan? Yeah. Well, that's their rating, so that they've rated our – but, like, I was just thinking on the list of challenges.

[00:40:59] We'll get that information to you. Where in that list of 17 challenges transportation is? It's not one of the highest or lowest. I just want to let you know we will provide you with the full report. This presentation was intended to be highlights, And we do recognize that you don't have the missing middle.

[00:41:19] Okay. Mobility is 19% have a need. So if we look at on that slide where it shows the top is 38, 37, and then the bottom is. So it's sort of in the middle, more toward the back.

[00:41:39] But 19% is where that lands of the respondents had a mobility need. And I think as we discussed, I think there's a lot of opportunities in the transportation area, especially if you look at leveraging Uber, Lyft, and some of the private sectors as something.

[00:41:55] So I think that's something that's worth being on the last page when we get to it. Okay, great. Thank you. Supervisor Seismur Heiser. Thank you. And again, thank you for this presentation and the information. It's very interesting and I think shows some trends to dig into.

[00:42:11] So I'll just start from there. First, on slide two and also related on slide 14, it talks about one of the low response rates. And I'm glad my colleague brought up the different languages and getting the data on who responded in different languages. That was one of my questions. But this particular one is the lower number from ages 50 to 64.

[00:42:30] And then when we look on slide 14, it talks about the amount of time caregiving. 22% provide care for a child under 18, 37% for someone over 55. I'm curious how many of the respondents from age 50 to 64 responded yes to one of those two.

[00:42:52] And one, and two, I am concerned about the low number of response from that generation because I think the challenges for that generation are very different than the ones that are 65 plus. We talk about the sandwich generation. That is that generation where their children come back from college are having much more difficulty in this economy with the cost of living and affordability.

[00:43:14] And parents are living older, so it's that sandwich. And I think planning ahead for the challenges for this generation needs to get a better understanding of what's happening with that generation now. So I would just put out that I think it is important to sort of dig into and try to really reach to those.

[00:43:30] I imagine the low response rate might be because of the sandwich generation. But I just saw that, and I wanted to flag those two pieces is to say I think it's important to separate, I think, how we approach those two groups. Can I just make one comment on that just real quick?

[00:43:49] Because I was thinking the same thing. And when I looked at the finding work in retirement number going up to 41%, I'm wondering if the lower percentage of people in 50 to 64, it's because they're working. And when you have a lower number of people responding to the survey in that age bracket and a higher number above that, is that, can we conclude that it's much more difficult to find work opportunities 64, 65 and over?

[00:44:17] And so I do think the point is important, and that is probably an example of that. Yeah. I really appreciate that, because I was actually giving my other point, too, is that also the work, people looking for work, is it more in that group? Are they working? I think it's just important to understand that that's a different set of challenges in that group.

[00:44:33] So thank you, Chairman, for that. I also wanted to mention on when it talks about the variety of housing right I looked at affordable housing accessible housing and variety I think we need to look at housing for all right affordable housing is a big component of that but also it talks about accessible housing and having a variety of options which goes mostly maybe more to zoning and and things like that so I think we need to make sure we talk about all three because that's what it showed in the survey data and I'm happy as housing chair to kind of talk to you more about that the work skills is the other thing I'm wondering if we can partner with or talk more about the gmu ollie program partner with nova the

[00:45:08] parks about providing more opportunities even if it's volunteers from others who are older and retired come in and teach some work skills to folks who need them and find creative ways and just the last thing i wanted to touch on was the long-term care needs which i think will be growing i think we need to also advocate with the state a little bit i'll put a plug in for that because some of the challenges for long-term care within the home setting is the low Medicaid waiver rates. It's about $18 an hour. And so finding steady caregivers, even outside of

[00:45:43] facilities, is another challenge, right? Finding the right facility and having availability in a facility for care. But home-based care, I think this is a really important piece that we're seeing as a challenge on the lack of, and SAIU, I know, has been working on this as well. But I think this is a great place that we should be raising our voice as well.

[00:46:01] I have more, but I'll stop there, but just a couple pieces there. Great. Supervisor Palcic. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you so much for the presentation. I think what's a challenge with sometimes surveys, especially if we're not creating them, right, is that they just lead to a lot more questions.

[00:46:18] And so, number one, I think it'll be really helpful to get the full report because some of the questions I have really follow on to some of what I've been hearing, which is number one, you know, we have minimal trend data here, but I think hopefully we'll be able to dive more deeply through the crosstabs into trends. And I guess my question is, even geographically, are we able to get that information because we're a big county? I have it broken out by each of the magisterial districts. So, okay, if there's a way to do that more by community or

[00:46:54] census areas, is that something we've looked at? The way the youth survey maybe can do it smaller, right um whether it you know they're doing it by pyramids or because even my my district is quite different right east and west and north so are we able to break it beyond just i think it's helpful for us to go back and look at the data and figure out the best way to sort of sort of sort of sort of call down into it and look into the data to figure out the best groupings um we should be able to do some census tract or sort of regional things but let us take a look at the data and we'll provide that as part of the update i know some of it might be you know too

[00:47:33] small data numbers but i do think there's just you know and this is the first step to me i just want to clarify this because so and it's not a survey we create it's one that we use i think it's really important to make sure we we communicate that and it says here that is the first step of the community engagement process because i know when we get to shape there we have a really robust right? I called it the golden standard, right? So what is the timeline of getting from the COSOA to further analyzing it, because it looks like we need some further analysis, to going into the Shape the Future of Aging process? Because that's the one where we really get to dive more deeply

[00:48:12] here in Fairfax. Do we have that? I think that's for me. A great question. And on the slide we didn't get to you. I was going to speak to that a little bit. John did mention that this is just the first step in our multi-layered approach to the community engagement process. We are already engaged with NCS and looking to schedule out our first series of meetings within each of the magisterial districts to do community engagement sessions. So my ask today was that I want to let you all know we'll be reaching out to your staff to seek some time on your calendars to set up

[00:48:51] these community engagement sessions come in the coming months into the winter and we'll be looking to do those either in person or remotely to encourage greater participation across the county but that is part of our next steps to getting information to help inform the next shape the future of aging. I would just add one thing to that is as you're reaching out to the communities it is a big concern the gaps we have in data and in uh response response data gaps so i would say like enlist our community right let's help understand where they exist and how we better

[00:49:29] encourage more people to give their responses to be part of this work because we can see clearly the most engaged are likely the ones who filled this out and i think there's a my big fear is those who are not engaged right and how we get that information so i think that's still a big gap this is a newer survey compared to how long we've been doing the youth survey and there we have a captive audience um so i just think getting help to get better uh more robust results especially from the underrepresented groups very helpful she mentioned that we're working with ncs that

[00:50:05] really is to really build on the inclusive community engagement framework that they have Sort of built out for us so that we are really taking that dive into sort of the underrepresented sort of populations That's great. And with them, I'm sure the faith communities are in front and center of that as well. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you Great Supervisor Lusk. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I'll go quickly. I've just got three kind of Questions for clarification or maybe you can just provide additional color on slide for Populations with more challenges Hispanic with the increase from six in 2022 to 14 and 20

[00:50:46] 26 if you can just help me understand kind of what that means in terms of the additional challenges what additional information Yeah, so and there are 17 of those community topics that they break it out into and out of those the 14 of those respondents who identified as Hispanic reported that there was a significantly higher percentage of Hispanics compared to non-Hispanics who reported challenges in that area.

[00:51:21] So yes, there are broadly, we've seen an increase in the challenges experienced by older adults who are Hispanic in the community. Okay. So that obviously means we'll probably have to do some things to try to address that.

[00:51:37] So I appreciate you bringing that to the forefront. The second one is under the opportunities on, I think it's slot 11. And this one just got me because it's such a drastic number between 2019 and 2026.

[00:51:54] So opportunities to enroll in skill building and personal enrichment classes, negative 23%. Can you help me better understand that one in terms of the issue that is being identified there? Yeah, that one, I mean, it may be, again, obviously COVID happens in between 2019 and 2022, but it's continued to go down.

[00:52:18] And this is something I think we're going to need to ask some additional questions about in the next phase. Yeah, that one's kind of blaring at me as well. So I appreciate that response. And then the last one, and this one kind of gives me angst, because I know we've been working so hard on it.

[00:52:37] This is going to be the slide number 12, sorry, slide 12, under opportunities. Yeah, I saw your reaction. I mean, I'm just like, I look at this, and I'm just like, wow. I mean, we've been working so diligently here, and I just hate to see this number trending really in the wrong direction.

[00:53:00] Any thoughts on this one as well? Again, the question is, you know, how much of a problem is their assessment of being a victim of a fraud or a scam? It doesn't say that they were. It's how much of a problem.

[00:53:17] So it could be a higher awareness of being of, you know, that we've done it. There's, you know, a lot more attention paid to this now, and people are more aware of this as a problem. But it's definitely not going in the direction that we want. But it doesn't necessarily mean 23% were the victim.

[00:53:36] Okay. That puts a different light on it. But I think it still expresses that there is a concern here as well. So we'll look forward to seeing kind of what we kind of fared out in the additional analysis as well. So thank you very much. Thank you. Okay.

[00:53:53] If there are no other questions, let's do go to the last slide. I think actually several of these have already been discussed by different board members. But future topics for the committee, looking at the community engagement development of the next strategic plan, and then also H.R. 1's impact on caregivers and older adults in long-term care.

[00:54:20] Thank you for bringing that up, Mr. Chairman. And I would just point out, you know, one of the issues, it's budget cuts, but it's also the work requirements. went from 54 to 65, so there are a number of lovely elements to that.

[00:54:37] I'm being sarcastic if nobody picked that up. But there's something I think we need to learn more about. And then housing affordability and older adults also has been mentioned a couple of times. And I would just ask, are there other issues that anybody – transportation, that was – yeah, that was another one, transportation.

[00:54:57] Okay, any other thoughts from board members on future topics? Okay, well, very good. Well, thank you all very much. I appreciate the presentation. Good discussion. Thank you to commission members that attended here today.

[00:55:13] And I did want to take personal privilege. I have a great aunt who is turning 103 today. So happy birthday, Ann Boyola. The party in Missouri, if anybody's there, is Saturday. So it's not today.

[00:55:28] It's Saturday. They're watching. Everyone's invited. So with no more business for the Older Adults Committee, we are adjourned.

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