WAUPUN — The new Senior Center facility project is moving forward on development after being presented to the Waupun City Council. The current plans for the new “intergenerational” facility were put together in November and presented by City Administrator Kathy Schlieve at the Special Common Council meeting on November 29th.
The idea for an intergenerational facility began in 2019 as a way to meet the needs of several growing organizations in the Waupun area, including the Waupun Senior Center, the Food Pantry, REACH Waupun, Waupun Area School District, and local childcare provider Wee-Care. Schlieve described the process of assessing community needs and priorities, noting that not everything they wanted was able to be covered by the project.
To cover the costs of the Senior Center project, the City of Waupun received a nearly $5 million Neighborhood Investment Grant from the State of Wisconsin. The new facility was decided to be built at 520 McKinley Street, the location of the former Christian Grade School and James Laird Museum which had been torn down last March.
“The challenge that we have to hammer on all the way through is that we have to do this in a way that’s sustainable,” Alderman Dan Siebers said. “The Public Works Department is going to have to maintain this building, we’re going to have to maintain staff, and so on. We need a good financial plan—we can’t come back to the Council in five years because the facility needs another $300,000, because we simply don’t have that. We have to figure out those pieces next.”
Schlieve explained that now that the initial site planning stage for the project is complete, plans have to be drawn up for how the facility would be operated, along with leases and space use agreements.
“As we’re talking to our partner organizations, we’re talking about long-term lease commitments, and we’re talking about how to generate revenue to offset the expense of this building because of the value it’s going to bring to the community,” Schlieve said.
Pure construction costs were estimated to be about $3.9 million, but other essentials push the total project budget to just under $5.3 million. Additional funding sources such as TIF expenditures and the sale of the current downtown Senior Center bring down the budget to $4.8 million.
Conceptual floor plans for the new Senior Center facility were presented to the City Council along with a land use map of the 520 McKinley Street plot. The current plans for the Senior Center facility includes designated rooms for a fitness center, a full basketball court gymnasium, and a multipurpose dining and event room with an attached kitchen. Rooms are also designated for the Food Pantry and REACH Waupun. These plans can be viewed below.
The new facility will be approximately 22k sq ft under the current plans and is slated to begin construction in October 2023, with a final completion date of December 31, 2024.
