City studying future of its
senior centers
Frank Morgan takes a shot on the 6-ball Wednesday at the Northside Senior Center, while Joseph T. Campos waits his turn. The City of Gallup is going to do a study on whether to keep the two senior centers it has, or build a new one to replace them. Photograph by John A. Bowersmith / Gallup Independent

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — With the help of a half-dozen local seniors, and a $200,000 grant from the state's Agency on Aging, the city is set to begin a study officials hope will help them decide what to do with Gallup's two senior centers. The committee, composed of three seniors from each center and headed by Recreation Director Esco Chavez, plans to have its first meeting in mid-June.

Their first order of business, said Martin Link, who'll be representing the southside center by Ford Canyon Park, will be a feasibility study.

"It's a study to look at Gallup's senior citizens in general and ask two questions," he said, which essentially boil down to one: Should the city keep the two centers it has now or operate just one?

That's not likely to use up the full $200,000, though. The grant, Link said, should also help the committee identify possible sites for any new center, buy the land to build it on and maybe even pay for an architect to design it.

But they'll have to start with the feasibility study, Link said; he hopes to have it finished by the end of the year.

City Manager Eric Honeyfield is hoping for much quicker progress. He'd like the committee to have a possible site for a new center selected by midsummer. That way, he said, the city would be ready to apply for the next round of capital outlays from the New Mexico Legislature or community development block grants from the federal government.

As far as Honeyfield is concerned, any questions about the feasibility of a single seniors center for Gallup have long been settled.

"The question of feasibility is a nonissue," he said. "It's mainly about sight location and design."

According to Honeyfield, the city and the Agency on Aging a major funder of local seniors programs have been discussing the possibility of combining Gallup's two centers for some time. A city Gallup's size really should have only one, he said.

Link isn't convinced just yet.

"We need to look at that, at the pros and cons of having one staff, one center," he said.

On the one hand, it would free the city of the overhead costs of operating two sets of staff. On the other, it would surely take more people to run one large facility than to run either of the centers the city operates now.

Even without the study, Honeyfield figures the city could save more than $200,000 a year most of it on personnel by running just one center. While the city could probably not get away with cutting staff in half it still has to serve the same number of seniors, after all he believes it could cut staff by at least a third.

If the city does ultimately decide on one center, Honeyfield and Link agree that neither current facility will do.

"If we went with either facility that we have now," the city manager said, "either you'd be short of parking or you'd be short of space."

If the city wants one center capable of doing the job of two, Honeyfield said, it will probably have to build an entirely new facility.

Honeyfield does not expect too much acrimony from the city's seniors if that's the final call. Link doesn't either, as long as the city can convince them that one center won't mean any less service.

As Link sees it, the city ought to be doing more for its seniors as it is. He hears plenty of talk from city officials about the brain drain among Gallup's youth, but little about the drain of its seniors. Link has known many a local professional transition into retirement, "and the first thing they do is get the hell out of Gallup."

Link himself is regularly asked why he bothers to stick around.

"People can't understand why anybody over 65 and is retired hasn't left," he said, "because what is there for old people to do?"

The golf course is shoddy at best, kids get the run of the indoor pool, and even the city's Senior Olympics team has to raise its own funds for competitions.

But most egregious in Link's opinion is the lack of an assisted living facility in Gallup, something between a standard residence and an old age home.

Honeyfield admits there's not enough to keep seniors here and that Gallup could use what he called a transitional living center. And considering the Social Security dollars they have to spend in the local economy and the relatively few locally funded services they use, he said, "that senior citizen is an attractive resident."

But the city simply hasn't the resources to build that kind of housing on its own, he said, and not one private developer has yet to approach the city with his own proposal in the three years Honeyfield has been here.

That makes a well-run seniors center all the more important. For many, Link said, the daily meals the two centers provide are "their (senior citizens') one time in the day when there is the need to get dressed up and socialize, and psychologically that's very important."

Including the meals delivered to local homes, the city's two seniors centers serve some 300 meals a day.