‘We do not want to settle.’ Fresno buys $6.4M site, signals big plans for new senior center
A former Vons grocery store along Fresno’s North Blackstone Avenue is destined to become the site for the city’s first large-scale senior citizens center.
The city of Fresno is buying the 5.5-acre site on the west side of Blackstone Avenue, between Gettysburg and Ashlan avenues, for $6,460,000. The Fresno City Council, in a special meeting Monday, voted 6-0 to approve the purchase.
In Fresno, the lack of a city-owned senior center has been a thorn in the side for older residents who for years have pointed to smaller cities in the area that do have their own senior centers – including Selma and Kingsburg – and wondered why Fresno, with more than a half million residents, does not.
“For more than a decade, members of our senior community have pleaded with city officials for a dedicated senior center for them to enjoy,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said Monday at a press conference in front of the vacant grocery building.
The former Vons, which closed in mid-2015, was later occupied by the short-lived Asia Supermarket, which was open for less than a year before it closed in 2016. The building, which amounts to almost 40,600 square feet, will be demolished to make way for the new senior center, Dyer said.
The purchase includes not only the former grocery store building, but also a nearby strip mall that currently houses an O’Reilly Auto Parts store and several other businesses.
Buying the property is but one step in what could be a 2 1/2-year process to get a senior center up and running. “We have a lot of work to do,” Assistant City Manager T.J. Miller said. “We need to roll up our sleeves and find out what the community wants.”
Dyer said the city plans to have “extensive community engagement” to determine what kinds of services and programs senior citizens across Fresno want in a new facility. “It will be their center,” he said. That engagement will take place through the remainder of 2022 before the city begins to solicit proposals for designing the center.
“We do not want to settle for something that is extremely small or doesn’t meet the future needs of our city,” Dyer said. He added that a new center could be about 30,000 square feet in size. “We do not have a cost, but we anticipate it will exceed $20 million in cost when all is said and done.”
That figure is in addition to the $6.4 million purchase price approved Monday by the City Council.
Dyer discounted the prospect of retrofitting the grocery store and said current plans call for demolishing the existing structure and building a new building from scratch.
“Based on what I’m told, based on the assessment of this facility, it could be cost prohibitive to (retrofit the existing building) for a number of reasons,” Dyer said, including current accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act, adequacy of wiring and other factors. “I’m told it would be best to start from the ground up.”
The money for the property purchase is coming from two sources: almost $5 million in federal Community Development Block Grant allocations to the city, and about $1.5 million from Measure P, a special city sales tax measure approved by Fresno voters in 2018 that tacks 0.375% onto the sales of taxable goods and services in the city. That amounts to about four cents on a $10 purchase, in addition to other state and local sales taxes.
What’s yet to be determined is where the money to design, build and operate the new center would come from. Dyer said the city will explore the prospect of additional federal block grants, Measure P funds, as well as spending from the city’s own general fund.
A staff report to the City Council states that services at a new could include a senior hot meals program; health, fitness and wellness classes and programs; transportation services; volunteer opportunities; and education, arts and technology programs. Dyer said there are also plans to build an outdoor green space for activities and relaxation, fitness equipment, walking trails, trees and spaces for gardening.
Fresno City Councilmember Tyler Maxwell, whose district includes the site, added that its proximity to Blackstone Avenue and its frequent bus service was an important factor for selecting the site over some other options.
Jeffrey Hallock, a retiree who lives in central Fresno, said he and other longtime advocates for the city to develop a senior center are “ecstatic” about the plans. “It’s so exciting. We never imagined the scope of a project like what the city is proposing here,” he said Monday. “We imagined a room and maybe some smaller rooms associated with it for some classes or what not.”
Hallock said he used to visit the Fresno Adult School’s former community education center upstairs in the nearby Manchester Center shopping center for senior fitness classes. There, he said, senior citizens “would come up there to the big common room … reading the paper, talking, working on computers, playing games.”
“I thought, ‘This is pretty cool,’” he said. But since that facility has closed, “that’s all gone away. The need is obvious.”
The city plans to solicit ideas from seniors on what they want to see the center include. “We want this center to be meaningful, we want this center to be purposeful, we want this center to be useful to our seniors,” Dyer said. “Seniors want a center they can be proud of, one they can call their own, so we intend to meet both those needs.”
Once that input has been digested, the city expects to hire a consultant in 2023 to begin drawing up designs, with construction anticipated in 2024, Dyer said.
The plans do not call for doing anything with the adjacent strip mall. Maxwell said that for the city to purchase the Vons site and parking lot from its owners, the separate parcel with the O’Reilly store and other businesses needed to be part of the package.
As a result, the city will become the landlord for those tenants, Dyer said.
This story was originally published July 25, 2022 at 1:19 PM.
