Agency on Aging needs new home

Ten years is a long time to spend in a building that was meant to be a temporary home for the Flathead County Agency on Aging programs.

There have been promises of a new facility through the years and some missed opportunities, but here it is a full decade later and the agency is still in the leased red barn on Kelly Road, serving meals and offering myriad services for our seniors.

The county began leasing the former auction barn in July 2002, and by 2004 then-Agency on Aging Director Jim Atkinson was quoted in the Inter Lake, saying the staff was “stuffed in the space with a shoehorn. It’s about half of the amount of room we need.” At that time Eagle Transit also had its offices in the Kelly Road building.

Even back in 2004 Atkinson was pushing for a bigger facility for senior programs and asked an architect to survey six sites. A 25,000-square-foot slice of Gateway West Mall got the nod, but the county commissioners kept the agency in its temporary digs.

In 2007 there was a plan to obtain the old armory near Peterson Elementary School for the Agency on Aging. That plan went down the tubes when Samaritan House got the building instead from the federal government.

Atkinson continued to pitch ideas to the county commissioners for a better facility. In 2009 he once again broached the idea of space at Gateway West Mall, which by that time had been transformed into a community center for nonprofits. His other suggestion was to build a new building on county land north of the fairground. The fairgrounds location surfaced again last year and still is being studied.

There have been some stumbling blocks, to be sure.

The Kalispell Senior Center wasn’t immediately in favor of merging with the Agency on Aging, which had been suggested as a cost-saving measure for the county. And let’s not forget the national recession that dug its claws into the Flathead in a big way starting around 2008. It wasn’t the best of times to be laying out large amounts of cash for capital improvements, though the county did renovate the main courthouse during that time.

At this point in time, though, the commissioners have a clear opportunity to make things right for our elderly residents who rely on these meals and services. We applaud their decision to pursue a Community Development Block Grant for a new AOA building that would be a nice financial infusion for the project.

Even if the block grant application isn’t approved, the county has other very viable funding options. More than $2 million could be used from the county’s share of payment in lieu of taxes (federal payments made to local governments to offset property tax losses due to non-taxable federal lands). A low-interest Intercap loan through the Montana Board of Investments is another possibility.

There seems to be a groundswell of support for a new facility to accommodate a growing sector of the local population. The commissioners need to stay the course and get it done.

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