Center project is using seniors as bait

The proposal to put a new senior center in Central Park is another “bait and switch” boondoggle. The project is not really a senior center, as much as it is a commercial enterprise. The centerpiece of the proposed building is a large conference hall that would hold 300 people. The plan is to rent out the hall for weddings and large parties. That means crowds of people, parking lots full of cars, loud music and the need to hire city employees to run this enterprise. This does not conform to the concept of a passive park and open space.

Experienced contractors are already warning us that the $23-million price tag for the massive 45,000-square-foot building could easily double in cost by the time it is built. How many noisy weddings would it take to pay for such a project?

We experienced this type of “bait and switch” with the sports complex. The sports complex was presented to a vote of the people of Huntington Beach as a $1.9-million sports playground for the children of our city. In fact, the project was pushed along by the leaders of the youth sports programs. Instead, the sports complex turned out to be a slick $18-million playground for adults. Many of those adults don’t even live in our city. To cap it off, the city hired a corrupt contractor to complete the complex. The contractor ran off with $1 million without doing the job. He left the city’s taxpayers to pay for the losses. Then the city stunned the taxpayers when they found that the voter-approved $1.9-million price tag was switched to an unauthorized and inflated $18 million. Are we now supposed to trust this same incompetent bureaucracy to do the senior center right?

The project proponents are proposing a new multimillion-dollar expenditure upon the taxpayers, and they’re using seniors as bait. Who doesn’t want to support seniors? But remember, seniors are only a part of this project. The big switch is the creation of a conference center that would require a huge slab of concrete on our open space. And it would bring a constant flow of large, noisy crowds, who would disrupt the rich bird habitat that makes Huntington Beach Central Park one of the premier birding spots of the region. It would destroy the serenity and rustic ambience of our beautiful city park forever.