GREENFIELD — City Councilors on both sides of the aisle questioned the use of the John Zon Community Center and implored the leader of the Council on Aging to find ways to open it up to the public for more hours and more days.
“I am very concerned how this facility is used,” Precinct 5 City Councilor Tim Dolan said at a recent budget meeting. “We’re not a town that has the resources to have a facility closed between 4 and 9 p.m.”
At-Large Councilor Isaac Mass shared Dolan’s concerns and said the city often promises that new buildings will become community spaces but rarely live up to that billing. He warned this could be an Achilles heel to the new library, which is likely to go before the voters later this year.
Hope Macary, director of the Council on Aging that oversees the senior center, defended her team’s work to make the center as available as possible given its current staff. The city budgets for about 2.3 employees, which includes three part-timers and Macary, the lone full-time employee.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Otis Wheeler concluded at the end of the lengthy back-and-forth that perhaps the city needs to consider adding an additional custodian or staffing that can bring it up to the needs of the community.
“If this is a problem that everybody is banging their head against the wall about, then I’d like to see in the budget $20,000 for a part-time custodian to open it,” Wheeler said. “We might shoot it down, but then we as councilors could take some ownership of the decision.”
Macary said about 100 seniors a day use the 9,800-square-foot, $4.2 million facility that opened a year ago. Since moving to the building, programming doubled, she said.
The conversation centered around both programs and community use.
Dolan said many of the complaints he receives from constituents are about the lack of use of the center, which he called the “finest facility in town in many ways.” It’s modern, accessible and centrally located, he said, yet it is not used by many of the 17,000 Greenfield residents.
“I don’t think it’s entirely fair for all of the taxpayers in this town to be funding a facility that is only used by a hundred seniors a day,” Dolan said, “as important as that is.”
He said going forward he will be monitoring use.
“I don’t have a desire to cut anyone’s budget, but if the Council of Aging is not able to manage the facility in a way to allow other groups to use it, then we may need to look at sharing the facility with another department in order to do that,” Dolan said.
“I totally agree with you and I hear those comments,” Macary said. “It’s a frustration for all of us. We all share that. It is a beautiful building and it should be used more.”
Macary said the senior center needs more funding to be able to expand its services.
“Expanding a small department to add more tasks to an already overstretched department — I hear your frustration, but how exactly would we do that?” Macary said.
She continued: “It’s tricky. I would just close by saying that I think that we didn’t do the best job as a community with this community center — because it was planned as a senior center. At the very last minute, the label community center and the name John Zon — and I loved John Zon; we were friends — but you can’t change the function of the department just by changing the name of the building. There’s structure in place. It’s going to take some time to do that. ‘Oh, we have a community center,’ and now we’re a community center?”
Mass refuted this argument, noting prior projects on similar billings: the new high school, the new transit center and the new senior center.
“All of these buildings do not belong to individual departments,” Mass said. “They are not fiefdoms. We need to break down walls and we need to start communicating with each other so that we, meaning we as the community as a whole, gets the most access and the most use out of all these buildings. Because it’s measures like this that are going to prevent people who have heard it again and again for voting for a library that is being sold on the idea of community access.”
You can reach Joshua Solomon at:
jsolomon@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 264