The Powell Senior Citizens Center finally has a path forward to replace its small, aging building.

On Monday the senior center closed on the purchase of the former VFW property on South Fair Street. The VFW had closed its building at the beginning of the year to hold its meetings at the American Legion due to dwindling membership and growing maintenance costs.

The senior center plans to demolish the VFW building after asbestos abatement is finished and construct in its place a roughly 8,600-foot, one-story building that board members and administration say will offer more space for the burgeoning amount of activities and services offered, and to handle the increasing amount of seniors who use the center.

“It became available and it was within a price range that we were able to handle as far as buying,” board treasurer Steve Martin said. “Plus the fact that we can build this thing to our own liking … this was basically a good clear cut way that we can go in and build this thing the way we want it.”

That’ll include more parking space, larger rooms, ADA compliant bathrooms and spaces such as card and exercise rooms.

While the senior center was able to purchase the property with money saved up, Program Director Linda Dalton said they’re now looking for grants and donations to pay for the estimated $6 million cost of a new building and landscaping. The senior center’s building committee chair, Wes Vining, said it’s now time to move forward to a bright future with a new facility on the horizon. The hope is for that new building to be constructed in one and a half to two years time.

He said the work to purchase the location from the VFW was a mutual benefit, as the senior center serves more than 100 area veterans.

“We had a mutual interest in developing this project, and they worked with us very well, very closely to make this a possibility,” Vining said.

Vining said they are now in the fundraising process, and Dalton said while they don’t have any large commitments yet she has many ideas about who to contact.

While center staff and board members past and present have been looking into a new building since late 2017, Vining said all of that prior work has helped inform where they are today. For instance, the designs they had worked out with Point Architects when they were trying to secure an agreement and funding to move to a spot next to the Rocky Mountain Manor are now being used as a base design to be tweaked and expanded for the new building.

That agreement with Rocky Mountain Manor, and a $1 million grant from Park County, fell apart after the senior center didn’t get a state COVID-19 era grant it had applied for to build a new building next to the senior living building.

Senior center leadership has been looking for awhile because the current building just does not match the needs of the senior center. While the building is roughly 6,000 square feet, Dalton said only roughly 2,500 square feet is usable for the seniors as the building is three stories.

“We average about 187 meals a day,” she said, which includes Rocky Mountain Manor and senior center dining rooms, and home delivered meals. “We had 266 meals on Thanksgiving that we provided and 254 on Christmas. It’s just it’s hard for the kitchen to do that with the limited space they have. It’s hard for our drivers to get people here because it’s always a backlog because people are trying to find a parking spot. We have just outgrown this building beyond belief … And so many things go wrong with a 70-year-old building.”

The men’s room is also such a problem for people in wheelchairs that board members said oftentimes they’ll instead go to the ADA bathroom at nearby Homesteader Park.

And they expect the trend of increasing service will only continue as Park County is an aging area of the state with 32.6% of county residents aged 60 or older compared to 23.6% for the state as a whole, according to the Wyoming Healthy Aging County Profile.

Because of the demographics, there are many organizations that want to help local seniors more, such as with taxes, Alzheimers support and blood pressure checks; they just need more space to offer even more of these services. Senior center leadership sees this new building as being able to provide what is needed.

“There are a lot of organizations out there that could serve our people, but we don’t have the space for them to come in and present their services to them,” Dalton said.

The goal of purchasing the VFW property is to change that reality as soon as they can.