FALMOUTH – On May 16, voters are being asked to allocate $9.5 million to design and build a new 17,000-square-foot two-story senior center next to the Gus Canty Community Center in the center of town.
The effort to build a new senior center to replace the existing overcrowded 4,000-square-foot building, built in 1974, is an old story. In this story, there are a lot of moving parts.
“Ten years ago, there was a different effort,” said Jim Vieira, who chaired a now-disbanded working group that selectmen appointed five years ago to look at different sites for the proposed new building. And even before the effort ten years ago, Vieira said, “in 2003, a previous group tried to get a new senior center and that failed.”
“We have had people tell us when we started, ‘We’ll never see it.’ And sadly, that is what happened.” – Jim Vieira, chairman of the Falmouth Council On Aging.
So it was 14 years ago, ten years ago, or five years ago that this effort first started. During this time, senior citizens, not surprisingly, were not getting any younger. And the town’s demographics have, meanwhile, been trending older.
“We have had people tell us when we started, ‘We’ll never see it.’ And sadly, that is what happened,” said Vieira, who is the chairman of the Falmouth Council On Aging. “We don’t want to lose another generation without giving them a building and an opportunity that they deserve.”
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