Commissioner duo is failing to lead

Do not mistake Flathead County Commissioners Gary Krueger and Pam Holmquist’s decision to stall the Agency on Aging building project as an act of leadership.

Their inability to choose a site and move forward with an application for a $450,000 Community Development Block Grant for the project should be a red flag to every county resident who voted for them to lead this county. Their blatant disregard of an architectural review — a review county taxpayers shelled out $4,400 to complete — of two county-owned tracts that recommended a site north of the fairgrounds is disappointing.

But even worse than leaving the county’s senior population with inadequate facilities for the many services run by the Agency on Aging is the fact that the Gateway Community Center lost its chance to vie for the block grant. Gateway Community Center, where the United Way of Flathead County and many of its nonprofit member agencies do their work, graciously stepped aside to support the county’s pursuit of a better facility for seniors. The city of Kalispell also was willing to allow the county to take the city’s grant slot.

Now it’s too late for anyone to meet the May 17 deadline, and valuable money that would have helped hundreds of people now will go to some other community.

Pam and Gary, this is shameful.

Of course, kicking the can down the road will continue to line the pockets of the owners of Alpine Business Center, which has leased the red barn to the county for the past decade and will continue to get $4,360 a month for the foreseeable future. Alpine Business Center is owned by a family group that includes Sharon Miller, Shelby Nash Hunter and Charles Lapp, whose wife Mickey Lapp was involved with the political campaigns of both Krueger and Holmquist. Is this the kind of smarmy favoritism we can expect from these two commissioners in years to come?

The commissioners’ vocal band of supporters would have you believe shelving the building project is somehow watching out for the taxpayers. In this case, though, county taxpayers aren’t being asked to spend a dime on the new building. There is more than $2 million that’s available from the county’s share of “payment in lieu of taxes” funding (federal payments made to local governments to offset property tax losses due to non-taxable federal lands).

There’s also the shallow rationale that a new AOA building only benefits a couple of hundred seniors. U.S. Census data shows that 15.1 percent of Flathead County’s estimated 91,633 residents in 2012 were 65 and over. That’s 13,745 seniors. By 2030 one in every four residents in Montana will be 65 or older.

So there are plenty of citizens who may one day depend on the Agency on Aging for assistance. And you can increase those numbers across the board when you realize that residents only have to be 60 years old to participate in AOA programs.

Besides which, do we really want to turn our backs on grandma and grandpa because they don’t have sufficient numbers to fight off two bully county commissioners?

We were proud of our county’s senior representatives for showing up on Wednesday and not being intimidated by the efforts to silence them. Some people even had the audacity to refer to these elderly activists as a mob. Well, if so, they are the mob that helped build this country into an economic powerhouse after World War II, and by the way, fought to keep us and the rest of the world free in three wars since 1941. Please don’t insult them.

Nor should the commissioners be allowed to get away with shifting blame for their own inaction to the staff of Agency on Aging or anyone else.

When the Agency on Aging was moved from Courthouse East to the rented barn in 2003, seniors were told it was a temporary location. The site north of the fairgrounds has been in the mix of options for several years, and let’s not forget the 4-H and Extension Service programs need a home, too, and could relocate to such a facility. Right now those two programs, which also serve hundreds of citizens, are operating in crowded cubicles alongside the county Health Department.

Holmquist, who proposed the vote to scrap the grant, said she wants to get through the upcoming budget process before she proceeds with the AOA project. She may have bought the commissioners some time, but they shouldn’t be surprised if seniors continue to hold their feet to the fire to get this project done. They’re tired of waiting, and rightly so.

We need more than lip service from the commissioners; we need leadership and we need it now.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.