TACOMA, Wash. — Tacoma’s Catholic Community Services deliver free meals to seniors throughout Pierce, King, and Lewis Counties, and Deryl Slaughter has been helping to deliver those meals for over 40 years.
After all this time, he says he still loves his job.
“It’s very rewarding to see these seniors have a hot meal or a frozen meal,” he said. “They don’t see anyone for one or two weeks, and we come in there with the meal and talk to them for a little bit to make sure they’re ok.”
But with 11 vans, Slaughter says lately it’s become a lot more expensive to deliver those meals.
“I do the gas receipts every month, and I’m looking at these receipts and I’m going wow!” Slaughter explains.
That surprise is being felt statewide.
According to AAA, the average cost for a gallon of gas in Washington is $4.95, the highest in the country.
Some policy analysts are placing the blame on state leadership.
Todd Myers from the Washington Policy Center says although gas prices tend to increase across the country during the summer, Washington is seeing even higher prices due to the state’s carbon pricing program which makes businesses pay for pollution, such as refineries.
That extra cost is being passed along to consumers.
“My frustrations isn’t that we are reducing CO2 emissions, we absolutely need to do that,” Myers explains. “But I think there are less expensive and more effective ways to do this that cause less economic shock.”
Now Slaughter has to figure out how to continue feeding his community as gas prices continue to climb.
“We don’t want to cancel our service, but if gas prices keep going the way it’s going, we’ll have to find some ways to cut a few things,” Slaughter said. “We’re not going to cut meal services, we’re not going to cut delivering to our seniors, we’ll have to find other avenues to make sure this works for us.”