Kabat’s senior center plans get a vote by council committee

Run down. Old. Dilapidated. Those are all words that have been used to describe La Crosse’s senior centers.

La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat’s ideas for the future of those centers gets a vote tonight.

A city council committee will consider Kabat’s proposal to immediately start design work to fix up the Harry J. Olson center on the north side and move the south side center to the south branch library.

Kabat says there should be an end to studying the centers and a start to working on them.

“It’s good that we start taking the steps to do it right,” he said.

Kabat wants $45,000 to begin design work on the projects. He also wants to earmark $250,000 in next year’s budget for repairs at the Harry J Olson center, although he thinks that may be a very optimistically modest estimate for those repairs.

“I’ve been doing this long enough now with these projects to plan for the most expensive and then you can be pleasantly surprised if it’s not,” he said.

Prior to Kabat’s proposal, the city council was scheduled to vote on spending $20,000 to simply hire a consultant to do another study on where senior centers should best be located.

Kabat suggestions help move the process forward, rather than being bogged down in the “what ifs” of the future of the centers and who would own them.

“At least for the next several years they’re going to be city owned and we need to be maintaining them appropriately,” he said.

Kabat hopes both centers will be done by the end of 2020.