Legislators back new Palmer Senior Center

WASILLA — The elderly and their advocates in Palmer got a bit of encouraging news Saturday at state Sen. Linda Menard’s town hall meeting Saturday.

“Our delegation is making it like a No. 1 priority to get the new Palmer Senior Center built,” Menard said.

Center Executive Director Richard Tubbs said the project is something the organization has been working toward for more than a decade.

“This project really started back in 1993 when we realized what was happening to the Mat-Su Valley,” he said. “It was growing exponentially.”

Along with that growth came a swelling of the senior population. For years the state had been exporting its seniors. They’d retire someplace Outside where the cost of living was lower. It wasn’t long, however, before the Lower 48 also became too expensive.

“The seniors were coming back to the state to live with their children,” Tubbs said.

The center’s role is to help seniors live independently, he said. Nursing home care is extremely expensive. The longer seniors can stay independent, the less it costs.

Rachel Greenberg, the center’s office manager, said the current building is an old church built in the 1950s. The senior center has $5.2 million for a new building, but best estimates show is it will cost $12 million for a new place for Palmers seniors to gather.

Though the entire state legislative delegation is behind the project, they’ve got their work cut out. First, the funding must find a way into the state’s capital budget. Then it has to get past the governor’s line-item veto.

Still, Menard said, “It’s almost unprecedented that (the delegation is) getting behind this.”

Also at Saturday’s meeting, Menard gave a rundown of where legislation she has sponsored is now that there are only 18 days left in the Legislature’s 90-day session.

She said her term-limits bill, which would put term limits for legislators to a vote of the people, hasn’t made it to the Senate floor for a vote. It’s still in committee. She said some of her colleagues joked about being put out of a job. All of them would be grandfathered in; their previous terms wouldn’t count against them. She said she’s heard arguments that the ballot box is the perfect term limiter.

Her answer, she said, is, “We all know that’s not true because you have such an advantage when you’re an incumbent.”

She’s also working on legislation to beef up the public notice and public involvement if and when an Alaska municipality begins considering changing its building codes to mandate fire sprinklers in homes.

“It passed unanimously out of the Senate. There was a companion bill in the House, so there’s a little bit of a glitch,” she said. But she’s hopeful a bill combining the two will pass.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.