By Patricia A. Scheyer
NKyTribune reporter
The Kenton County Mayors’ Group hosted a speaker Saturday at their May meeting. Laura Allen is doing a study for Kenton County on aging, and she brought a small questionnaire which she handed out at the meeting with questions that will help her in her Age Well Initiative.
“I am a post doctoral research associate from the Erickson school of Aging Studies, and my research team and I received a grant from the Kenton County Fiscal Court to conduct an assessment on aging in Kenton County,” Allen said, and explained that she grew up in Kenton County and attended Simon Kenton High School. “We are doing this assessment in collaboration with the Northern Kentucky Area Development District, and it is a five year study that we are doing over the course of one year. We started this past January. Our program uses an asset-based community development approach, so that we can identify people, groups and resources throughout the county, and throughout the process, so that at the end of the year we can also deliver a network of people who are ready to put this plan into action.”
She said they didn’t want to just hand over a plan to Kenton County that had only the beginnings of the program, only the needs assessments, so they knew they wanted to present the county with a developed plan.
They put together a list of about 25 stakeholders in aging services, and she said those people have been a fount of information about what services are available, data services, and who is doing what at the various senior centers.
“The older population is rapidly growing,” she told the mayors. “People are living longer, with advances in medicine. In 2024 the total number of adults over the age of 65 was around 28,500, or about 16.3 percent of the population. But you can see that number is rising, and it is expected to be about 18.7 percent by the year 2030, and it will likely be over 20 percent of the population by the year 2040.”
She said that Northern Kentucky’s numbers mirror those of the entire state of Kentucky, as well as the United States.
There are large generational cohorts, like the baby boomers, who are turning 65, and the fertility rates are dropping which gives Allen a perfect scenario. The generational cohort theory is the concept that a generation of people that experience the same political, economic and social events during the early parts of their lives will develop a set of beliefs, and behaviors that are similar.
Allen also showed a slide which depicted the old age dependency ratio, a comparison which shows the ratio of people over 65 versus people who are ages 20 to 64, considered working age. In Kenton County in 2020 the ratio was 26 to 100, and in the state of Kentucky, that ratio the same year was 30 to 100, so they are very similar. By the year 2030 the number is expected to rise, and there will be 33 older people for every 100 working people.
“This could pigeonhole the older population as needy,” she said. “This measure doesn’t capture, for example, the numerous portion over the age of 65 who are still working, who are providing care giving, who are economically contributing. It also doesn’t include the ones younger than 65 who are not working or contributing in some way. But for now, this gives us a snapshot of the balance between the people who are likely needing support and social services, and those who are providing it through work, taxes, and caregiving.”
She said it doesn’t provide a perfect picture but they are working on a way to measure the economic consumption and contribution in detail in Kenton County. It also gives an idea of the trend of where things may go, and the potential burden on working age people if they don’t shore up the senior services now.
“Our main research question is, what do you want your community to look like as you age in the next five years?” she repeated the question that was on the paper she handed out. “But our plan now is to collect primary data in the form of community conversations, focus groups and one on one interviews, and in the meantime we are also pulling secondary quantitative data from many sources to help us understand a more detailed picture of aging in Kenton County.”
She said they have had five community conversations, in Erlanger, Ludlow, Edgewood, Covington, Piner, and next week they will have an event at the Library in Independence.
“These are opportunities for people to come and talk to us,” she explained. “And answer these research questions.”
She said they met with meetNKY ambassadors as their first focus group, and she was surprised to find out that those members are almost all retired women.
Allen asked everyone if they know of any groups, which don’t necessarily have to be retired people, and she said this summer she planned to have booths at several places, including the Farmers’ Markets. She plans to be at the Senior Games, and asked the mayors if they had any other places they thought she could have a booth.
“I will give you a picture of what we’ve found so far, “ she said. “These are the topics that have come out of our conversations so far—housing, transportation, long term care, including in-home, assisted living, skilled nursing, access to information, including digital literacy, food security, and social participation, recreation, and wellness.”
She said she is working within those topics, giving Kenton County almost like a score card or a grade, and they would like to break it down by city, on housing and social participation. She gave the cities a heads up that she would be looking at their statistics.
Kenton County Commissioner Jon Draud asked her how she arrived at the age of 65 instead of an older age for her research.
Allen said that is the age that the government issues Social Security, and Medicare usually starts. She said that is the age that most data sources use.
“I think it is sort of outdated, since people are living longer,” he said. “You know, for example, to someone like me, 65 is like a youngster. I think the number should be adjusted upward.”
“I agree that it is not the best measurement we have, but since most of the data has delineated that, we use that, but we realize that the older population is just as diverse as people younger than 65,” she said. “We hope to reflect that in our survey. After all, we are all aging here in Kenton County.”