By Gary Ogle
gogle@wbcowqel.com
Believing that good things do come to those who wait, Crawford County Council on Aging Executive Director Peg Wells was all smiles Tuesday at the thought of shoveling dirt. Not just any dirt, but the ceremonial first shovelful for the groundbreaking celebrating the beginning of the agency’s $390,000 kitchen project.
“We talked about this at a board meeting in 2004,” Wells recalled. “We’ve dreamed about this for a long time.”
Dreamed and saved. The agency is funding the project through dollars it has been frugally saving over the years. The $390,000 price tag is for the building only and does not include equipment.
“This is money we’ve been able to set aside for a long time,” Wells said.
The 40-feet-by-60-feet facility will be located just south of the Council on Aging’s current building at the corner of Spring and Poplar streets in Bucyrus. It will just be a kitchen and not a dining room facility.
“We will continue to serve our congregant meals here,” Wells said while standing in front of the agency’s existing building. “We’ll package and bring those meals in here.”
J&F Construction is the general contractor on the project. Wells said because of starting in the fall and the uncertainty of the weather no date has been targeted for the project’s completion.
“But I’m impatient,” Wells laughed.
As Wells explained the situation, the hope is that the new kitchen will do a couple of things for the agency.
First it will allow the agency to be competitive in trying to maintain and hold onto current contracts that it has for preparing meals rather than see them go to an entity outside the county.
“We are competing with other folks to win that bid to prepare the food. We really, really want to keep that local,” Wells said. “Because we have so much better contact with our consumers to know their likes and dislikes, and it’s a good thing for the agency in that we’re keeping everything local, we’re keeping it all right in the community.”
Wells added that by keeping the contract it would provide some revenue for the agency, revenue that allowed them to save up funds to build the new kitchen and hopefully in the future expand services as well.
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