Our seniors can’t wait forever.
The effort to replace the aging city-owned bayfront building where Grand Traverse County operates senior center services has dragged on for more than two decades. During that time, schools, roads, neighborhoods, and parks have been designed and built by local governments. All of them funded, at least in part, by local taxpayers.
Yet, this much-needed project lingers.
It lingers because local elected officials and bureaucrats simply can’t agree on how to fund the rebuild and share responsibility for the new facility. Because a couple of governments (both funded entirely from our collective pockets) can’t agree on who owns, manages and pays for what.
All that gear-grinding means a project that should’ve been completed a decade ago has moved on and off of shelves in government offices, but never progressed to fruition.
In the meantime, many seniors who devoted their time and effort to help shape the rebuild have died. They died waiting. Waiting for a safe and appropriate home for services they enjoy. Waiting for our community and its leaders to publicly acknowledge their importance.
Let’s be real here, these are people who form the backbone of our region’s extraordinary volunteerism. They help form and support all the vibrant civic organizations we so cherish. They also pay bundles in taxes that foot the bills for an avalanche of construction and reconstruction projects from which they will see little or no personal benefit.
So why do we continue to tolerate the ridiculous – at times petty – wrangling that continues to delay construction of a new Senior Center?
At this point, we’re beyond caring who started the last spat between Traverse City and Grand Traverse County officials, the schism that in 2020 scuttled momentum toward a millage request to fund the rebuild.
Egos kept the millage question from voters, robbed taxpayers of their right to decide whether to go into their pockets to support our seniors, our neighbors. Instead, some officials seem enamored with the idea of forcing our seniors to fundraise for a new home for their services.
Fundraise.
Maybe we should ask those same officials to fundraise for their next pay hike, benefits expansion or government-owned take-home vehicle.
A waterfront senior center rebuild is decades overdue.
Today, we’re encouraged by progress those two governments have made toward an ad hoc committee to move the project forward.
But we, like so many of you, have grown tired of all the talk, all the lip service. Nearly two years since the last debacle delayed the project, we simply aren’t sure the people involved are capable of treating our seniors with the respect they’ve earned.
We’re now watching a pair of governments, flush with a rainstorm of pandemic-triggered taxpayer cash, launch into yet another round of talks.
This time, we need more than another round of chatter, bickering and false starts.
We need a new senior center.
