Senior center going up at last

PALMER — A lot of big names in state and local politics showed up for the ceremony Wednesday to mark the start of construction on the new Palmer Senior Center.

Palmer Mayor John Combs talked of the years-long process to secure funding and the hard work and occasional setbacks that entailed.

“The day is finally here and that’s what counts,” Combs said.

Senior center manager Rachel Greenberg described the fund-raising as a 17-year effort that culminated this spring when the last $6 million was included in the state’s capital budget. The new center is a roughly $12 million project.

In his remarks, Gov. Sean Parnell took an informal poll of the audience.

“How many of you wrote a letter to the governor’s office about the senior center?” he asked, then watched as many in the audience raised their hands. He said that in an age of e-mail and text messages, letters written on actual paper have weight. “You can believe I read every one of those.”

Rep. Carl Gatto, R-Palmer, pointed to the big hole in the dirt behind the stage he stood on and indicated where an elevator shaft had been started.

“If you have good vision, you’re seeing the future right there,” he said.

Rep. Bill Stoltze, R-Chugiak, who also pushed to get the center funded, further commended the community.

“I’ve probably never had a better lobbying force when that red pen jumped over that number in the budget.,” he said, noting that they wrote Parnell those letters and kept up the pressure all the way through the governor’s veto process.

Former Valley state senator Lyda Green said that in deciding which projects to push for, she prefers projects organizers have already begun the preliminary work on.

“It was very obvious that the lion’s share of the work had been done by you and your predecessors,” Green said of the senior center project.

Elizabeth Ripley, head of the Mat-Su Health Foundation, which contributed $1 million to the project, reminisced about her first time going to the senior center, walking through winding, cramped corridors and about “how scary it felt to be in the basement so far away from an exit.”

But, she said, the people inside the center were full of life and the services offered seemed to be busting the building at its seams.

“This new building will be bigger, it will be safer,” Ripley said. “But it will still be just a building.”

What will make it special, she said, are the people there and the work they do.

Also speaking at the event were state Sens. Linda Menard and Charlie Huggins, as well as an aide from U.S. Sen. Mark Begich’s office. Richard Tubbs, the center’s executive director, rounded out the bill. He said the work the senior center does seems in agreement with advice his parents gave him.

“You’ve got to put more on the table of life than you take off it,” he said.

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