The one time levy would generate $2,290,000. It would cost $1.32 a month or $15.78 a year for the owner of a $100,000 home.
“This is a very small amount,” said Stacy Barnhart, executive director for the Urbana Champaign County Senior Center. “The UCCSC will celebrate 50 years in 2021. It would be wonderful if we could celebrate that 50-year milestone in a new facility.”
The UCCSC has over 600 members, employs six people, and also uses volunteeers.
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The money will be used to build the new center and expand senior services. The current center is about 7,000-square-feet, and the new facility will offer about 9,000-square-feet.
“The new center will be a bigger, one level building for easier senior access,” said Barnhart. “A commercial kitchen to be able to add an additional nutritional lunch day, pickelball court, covered drop-off area, better traffic flow and parking, additional space for our outreach needs and better storage for our senior outreach needs.”
The center has an existing five-year, 0.4-mill levy that passed in November 2018 to provide and maintain senior citizen services or facilities.
“Our operational levy that was in 2018 costs the average homeowner $1.16 a month or $13.92 a year,” Barnhart said. “Both of these small levies together would equal $2.48 a month or $29.76 a year.”
After the five years, the new building levy, if passed, would come off and the taxpayer would be back to the $1.16 a month or $13.92 a year, said Barnhart.
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Civista Bank donated 2.2-acres of land to the Senior Center in January 2019 to relocate and build the new facility, but it turned out to be pretty costly.
In a recent letter to senior center members, Barnhart said the new facility would cost close to $3 million.
“We cannot afford to build this building without community support,” she said in the letter. “Through years of saving and investing, the center currently has close to one-third of this cost.”
Barnhart said from the time the project started, construction costs have risen about 33%.
“To finance the entire center would jeopardize the current programming,” she said. “We would have to cut back on many of the senior programs we currently offer and we don’t want to do that. We want to continue to offer programs to seniors at a low cost/no cost fee just as we do now.”
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