By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

When Fayette County commissioners voted early this year to reverse the previous commissioners' decision to provide a specific three-acre parcel for a new senior center, they promised that the delay would be only temporary.

Commissioners are almost ready to come through on that promise, says Commissioner Greg Dunn.

The board has completed purchase of about 21 acres near the current 13-acre county jail and judicial complex, and the new land connects the old site with a 33-acre parcel that had been set aside for a new jail and courthouse.

The resulting new 67-acre site will house a master-planned government complex including jail, courthouse and a new administration building for county government.

The site will fill the county's need for government buildings “through build-out,” said Dunn, including a site for the senior center. “They'll get at least three acres,” said Dunn.

Currently, the most popular of several tentative layouts for the new government complex would put the senior center next to a main entrance off Jimmy Mayfield Boulevard.

“That way, they'll have easy access from Jimmy Mayfield and they won't have to get tied up in all the traffic around the complex,” said Dunn, who heads up a committee of county and Sheriff's Department officials discussing plans for the complex.

Land that will be set aside for the new county administration building, part of the heavily wooded southern portion of the overall property, won't be needed for five to ten years.

Meanwhile, walking trails that the county recently built on the site are accessible from the current senior center, and they'll be just as easy to use from the new one, Dunn said.

The current center faces Lee Street. The most likely site for the new center is directly on the opposite side of the wooded area, on Jimmy Mayfield, and will connect to the trails just as easily, he said.

Commissioners late in 1998 voted to designate a three-acre site for a new senior center on the north side of the current center, with Commissioner Harold Bost voting “no.” Bost argued that the county's plans for future facilities weren't firmed up well enough to pick out the specific site.

When newly elected commissioners Greg Dunn and Linda Wells took office in January, they joined Bost's side in that argument, and reversed the earlier decision.

Senior advocates expressed concern at the time, and Dunn and Bost attended a board meeting of Fayette Senior Services to explain themselves.

“We have to start thinking in terms of our permanent home for the jail, for the judicial complex, for the administrative facility,” said Bost. “What we have to do at this time is develop a master plan that will take us into our permanent home.”

Once the plan is in place, he added, “We merely plug this [senior center] into the plan as it comes up.

“We have not backed off of our commitment to do something for the senior citizen facility,” Bost continued, “but it could be a different three acres.”

County officials have not yet decided which of several proposed layouts they'll use for the complex, Dunn said following completion of all the land purchases last week, but they hope to do so within a month or so.

Once that's decided and a definite location identified for the senior center, then Fayette Senior Services can continue with the drawing of architectural plans and application for grants to help fund the center, said FSS director Andy Carden.

Carden envisions a 13,000-sq. ft. facility that can serve both active and less active seniors.

Such a facility could cost $1.5 million to $2 million or more, depending upon how elaborate the FSS board of directors elects to make it, he said.

The current senior center, an old house at 390 Lee St., is too small for the services that FSS offers, he said.

FSS moved into the 3,300-sq. ft. house soon after it organized about 20 years ago, and members of the group have been working toward the hope of a permanent facility ever since then, Carden said.

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