Surf City seniors seek site

Eron Ben-Yehuda

Facing a rising population of senior citizens, the city struggles to find

a center to meet their growing needs.

While the current facility may have outlived its usefulness, the

alternatives hashed out by the city so far present their own problems,

said Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services.

“We haven’t ruled out anything yet,” he said. “[But] everything is

complicated.”

The need to replace the Michael M. Rogers Seniors Center, at the corner

of 17th Street and Orange Avenue, was evident last Friday afternoon.

Seniors taking a line dancing class were relegated to a cramped side room

because workers had to set up the auditorium for an event that night,

program coordinator Sam Thomason said.

“We can’t accommodate all the things that we’d like to have going on,”

she said.

More residents than ever have reached their golden age, center director

Nora Webb said. In 1990, about 30,000 people, or 16%, were over the age

of 55, she said. That total is expected to rise to 36,000 by 2010, she

said.

“The Baby Boomers are coming up and that’s a huge group of people,” she

said. “We need to prepare.”

The city figures a new center requires a three-story building with about

200 parking spaces, Hagan said. It could redesign and expand the current

facility, which served as a barrack for oil workers in the early 1940s,

but such a large project would intrude on the surrounding residential

neighborhood, he said.

One undeveloped property that shows promise sits by Main and Gothard

streets, near the Seacliff Village shopping center currently under

construction.

The advantages to the site include close proximity to future stores and

City Hall, Hagan said. The city is considering swapping city property

with the company owning the land but isn’t sure whether the company’s

interested, he said.

The first three floors of the Pacifica Medical Tower by Main and Delaware

streets could be the answer, but the current owners are embroiled in

bankruptcy, which clouds the building’s future, Hagan said.

Golden West College may have land available, he said. Because the school

offers a gerontology program, seniors would have easy access to

volunteers and interns, he said. But with the campus located at the far

end of the city, Westminster seniors may end up benefiting more than

those in Huntington Beach, he said.

The city previously had pinned its hopes on a center at Bartlett Park, at

the corner of Beach Boulevard and Adams Avenue, but archeological remains

discovered in April make building there very costly, he said.

The city will continue to study all the options, but time is not on its

side, Hagan said.

“It’s imperative in the next three to five years that we come up with a

solution,” he said.