Elderly, disabled and low-income residents who currently receive assistance at the Baltimore County Department of Social Services' district office on Frederick Road in Catonsville may soon have to meet with their social workers elsewhere — but it won't be far.
The 10,000-square-feet building at 910 Frederick Road where the office is currently located also houses the state's Bureau of Long Term Care, and is too small to accomodate both staffs, according to Pat Hines, a spokesman for the state's Department of Human Resources, which oversees social services departments statewide through the Social Services Administration.
"It's really not the best fit," Hines said.
Because of that, state and county officials are meeting next week to discuss the possibility of freeing the entire Frederick Road building for the bureau's 40-person staff and relocating the 13 social workers to another building in the Catonsville area, possibly a county-owned one, Hines said.
"We're just looking at all of our options for how we can best accommodate the needs for both of those staffs," he said.
Rumors that the social workers might be moved to one of the county's other district offices in Reisterstown, Towson, Dundalk and Essex are not true, he said.
"We're committed to keeping that Catonsville DSS office in that community," he said. "Nobody will have to go to Towson or Dundalk or anything like that."
A location in Catonsville will be found that "doesn't impose significant hardships on our clients in terms of travel," Hines said.
That's a good thing, according to client advocates, who said access to transportation is a key issue for many people receiving social services support.
"For people who either don't have independent transportation or have unreliable transportation, which means you're always one accident or repair away from not having any transportation, that makes it very challenging, especially in a county as widely spread out as Baltimore County," said Linda Lombardo, executive director of Catonsville-based Lighthouse, Inc., which provides youth and family services to many clients who also receive social services assistance at the Catonsville office.