Abingdon Senior Center Dispute Remains Unsettled

ABINGDON, Va. – A unanimous vote of the Abingdon Town Council settled two issues for the Abingdon Senior Center: granting special-use permits for the center to operate both as a club and a party house, with restrictions on serving alcohol.
Still unsettled, however, is the debate over the future of the center, which recently completed a ballroom and opened a café.
According to town code, the club designation allows the center to provide facilities for dining and other activities to its members; a party house designation allows “a place for the occasional service of meals to organized groups.”
Executive Director Dexter Peltzer, who’s been on the job for about a year, said he is responding to needs in Abingdon’s senior community and creating a welcoming environment.
“Part of it is new, and part of it is to try to go back to the way it used to be, to the vitality of having a lot of seniors out here enjoying themselves,” Peltzer said. “I understand that change can be difficult, but at the same time we’re trying to meet the needs of a retired community ... that really likes things that revolve around food and entertainment and socialization and just good old fun.”
Polly Wirt, a former senior center director for 28 years, said the changes encompass a profit motive and are in conflict with the center’s original mission.
“The people who dedicated their resources and talents [created] the center to be a place where they were free from the everyday person off the street,” Wirt said. “What they’re doing now is a far deviation from enriching the lives of seniors. What they’re trying to do is promote just dollars, dollars, dollars.”
Center staff said they’ve seen increased attendance since the cafe opened and the ballroom was completed.
At public hearings before the council Monday, those in favor of the special-use permits – the majority of those in attendance – praised the center for enriching the lives of seniors. Those opposed contended that the changes will open the door for drunkenness and sin to disrupt the neighborhood.
A key part of the disagreement over the changes is the alcohol provision in the special-use permits. While the permits prohibit alcohol at senior center functions, they do not prohibit groups that rent the facility from serving alcohol if they obtain permission from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.
“Certainly I am in favor of senior citizen programs. … I’m in favor of everyone being fiscally responsible. … I have no opposition whatsoever to anyone trying to raise money to help with these programs,” said Jerry Edgers, who spoke against the permits Monday.
“What I am opposed to is the sale and consumption of alcohol, anywhere, any time.”
The town provides $20,000 of funding for the center in a typical year, said Town Treasurer Mark Godbey. This year, the center received $60,000, in part to help with its $250,000 capital improvement project.
Peltzer said the permits will allow the center to raise the money it needs – through food sales and facility rentals – to pay for the new ballroom. Also, he said, it allows seniors to stay for longer periods of time because they don’t have to leave to eat and it creates a social atmosphere centered around food.
Seniors at the center Wednesday praised the changes – and none said they’d personally heard a complaint.
“People have personal agendas, and the senior citizens’ center has just been caught in the crossfire,” said Nancy Wampler, a senior center member playing Bridge there Wednesday. “The community is making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Nancy Metcalf, manager of the Abingdon Bridge Club, said the center was on the verge of financial failure before Peltzer came with a business plan.
Sue Payne, another member who praised the upgraded facilities, said: “We are really fortunate.”
Center members have been down a long road to see the 15,000-square-foot facility built in 2002 finally finished this year.
The organization formed in the early 1970s, when they began meeting in a room above a Main Street business. As the group grew, they met in various locations before they bought and renovated a house. But even there, occupancy limitations meant larger events could not be held.
“Any time we expected more than 50 people, we had to pick up everything and move,” Wirt said.
Then a group of 120 seniors met at the Abingdon Moose Lodge to discuss plans for a new building.
“It was single-minded determination, those 120 people who met out there all stood up and pledged,” Wirt said. “These people, most of them were not people of means. These were just elderly widows and people who had worked in sewing factories.”
With the help of community leaders, the senior center was able to bring senior housing to Abingdon at a time when many seniors lived in drafty houses that lacked indoor plumbing. A housing project next door to the current senior center on Senior Drive paved the way with infrastructure for the senior center.
Peltzer said that now, a time when every group is in need of increasingly scarce funding, it makes sense to shift to money-generating activities to help pay for an increased slate of programs.
Wirt said the center should do what it’s always done: rely on donations.
“That’s what we did for 35 years and operated very well,” she said. “The [paid] staff that they have there now is about the same as we had in volunteers.”
She said plans are in the works among some residents to form a new seniors group in Abingdon – not to compete with the senior center, but to provide an alternative.
Peltzer said it’s a free country – and any group that wishes to start its own senior center is welcome to do so. As for the Abingdon Senior Center, he said, positive change will continue in response to voices from the community.
“We’re going to go in a direction that will provide the activities and the support of the senior community,” Peltzer said. “As a whole in Abingdon and the surrounding area, we’re going to continue forward.”

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