Free rides to seniors’ doctor appointments set to return

In recent months, seniors in Glen Cove have had to pay taxi fares and rely on family to travel to their medical appointments. For those who live on fixed incomes, these expenses can be difficult to keep up with. 

The Glen Cove Senior Center had a regular driving service before the pandemic, but it ended amid the restrictions necessitated by the health crisis. Ever since, seniors across the city have been left to their own devices when they’ve needed to see their doctors.

“Unfortunately, they don’t have transportation on their own,” Christine Rice, the senior center’s executive director, said. “nd a taxi ride back and forth is a lot of money.”

On April 11, Councilwoman Danielle Fugazy Scagliola, City Controller Michael Piccirillo and the Glen Cove Police Department presented the center with a decommissioned police vehicle, a Chevrolet Crown Victoria, to be used as a medical transport vehicle. 

“The bedrock of any good police department is community well-being, community health and community safety,” GCPD deputy chief Chris Ortiz said. “And if there’s anything that we can do, in terms of assisting with this endeavor, we certainly would make every effort to do so, you know.” 

The coordinator of the senior center’s driving service, Phyllis Burnett, spearheaded the effort. Burnett, who has been driving for the program for at least 10 years, advocated for a new vehicle. “She is a driving force behind the program,” Scagliola said. 

The service once drove seniors from across the city, even if they weren’t regular members of the center, to their medical appointments in the area. It operated from Monday to Friday, and seniors usually called a week ahead to schedule a ride.

Before the pandemic, Burnett said, the center used an older vehicle, a Subaru, to take seniors to their appointments at no charge. When doctors’ appointments became restricted and there were lockdowns due to Covid, however, the vehicle wasn’t driven, and fell into a state of disrepair. “After a while,” Burnett recalled, “people forgot about the car, and then the car just died.” 

As the pandemic eased and restrictions on in-person appointments loosened, Burnett began fielding calls from seniors asking that the driving service be revived, because they couldn’t afford the trips to and from those appointments. “And I [couldn’t] take them anywhere,” Burnett said. “I [couldn’t] take them in my private car because it’s a liability, an insurance risk.”

The senior center didn’t have the funds to repair the Subaru, because the transport service relied heavily on donations from passengers, which ended during the pandemic. The cost to fix the vehicle would have been at least $12,000, Scagliola said, so the only option was to buy a new vehicle. 

“We needed a new car,” Burnett said. “The car that we had had over 100,000 miles on it. I’m not going to risk breaking down carrying these clients.” 

Luckily for the center, the GCPD was receiving new police vehicles and decommissioning their older ones. After hearing that news, and knowing the center’s predicament, Scagliola saw a chance to help the center. 

The police typically loan their decommissioned vehicles to other city departments, Ortiz said, because the cars are still in good condition but no longer appropriate for police work. 

But the Crown Vic will work just fine for the seniors. The service should be up and running again by June, Burnett said, but she needs to get more drivers to volunteer. Right now, she has two besides herself, but to restart a service that will be available every day of the week, she said, she needs at least four more. 

Burnett said that driving for the seniors has been fun, and has changed her perspective, because she came to understand the difficulties of losing one’s independence. Over the years, she said, her clients have become her friends. “[During Covid] I missed that exchange, that energy, that enlightenment that they have given me,” she said.