Open Almost 25 Years, Windy Hill Senior Center Closes Doors Today

Today is the last day Gailya Stevenson and her friends will play canasta at the . The facility will be closed for good today at 5 p.m.

Stevenson with the Cobb County Board of Commissioners last month when they proposed closing 13 libraries and three senior centers as a means of closing the $31 million budget gap.

Ultimately, the libraries survived the cut, but the Windy Hill Senior Center did not. This left Stevenson and her friends at Windy Hill feeling betrayed.

“We’re the ones who’ve worked all this time, paid taxes all of our lives,” Stevenson said. “We’ve bragged on Cobb County for doing so much for their seniors, now it seems like they just want to kick us all to the curb. So yes, I’m angry with them.”

The libraries will remain open with limited hours, and each department in the county was asked to cut 10 percent from their budgets, including Cobb County Senior Services, the department that operate the Windy Hill Senior Center.

Pam Breeden, Cobb County Senior Services executive director, explained that that’s harder than it seems.

“It’s hard to come up with,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but when you’ve already lost so many employees to the retirement buy-out last year or when you’ve had your budget cut a number of times, the only thing you can do is close down buildings.”

Two of the three employees at Windy Hill have been relocated to other senior centers in the county. But for one part-time employee, furlough days and reduced hours meant the job was no longer worth it.

“We are cutting back on hours of part-time people, not all of them, but some of them,” Breeden said. “And with the gasoline prices going up, with the furlough days and with cutting back the number of hours they could work a week, for some folks it just became not viable for their family for them to continue. So I did lose the part-time person that was there. She did resign.”

Stevenson doesn’t see how these measures are saving money.

“Where are they saving money at?” she asked. “They’re the people that make the least anyway. They’re the minimum wage-type jobs. They need to go after some of these big high-paying jobs.”

The Windy Hill Senior Center opened in 1987 and was the first multipurpose facility of its kind in Cobb County. The facility is 16,000 square feet and ultimately its size made it a target for closure.

“Per square footage it was the least used of the facilities,” Breeden said. “It’s not that they didn’t have a lot of people coming. When we look at another building that’s half the size and they’re bringing in the same number of people and same amount of revenue, well this building should have been bringing in twice the amount of people and twice the amount of revenue. And it wasn’t. That’s how it kind of rose to the level that it would be vulnerable.”

The Windy Hill Senior Center offered classes and social outings for Cobb County residents aged 55 and older. It was also the meeting place for many civic groups, including the  Smyrna Kiwanis Golden K Club, and a pick-up site for Meals on Wheels volunteers.

The Kiwanis Club will relocate their meetings to the on Church Street in Smyrna.

The Meals on Wheels program will not be affected by the closure. The meals are prepared at the Senior Services office at 32 N. Fairground St. in Marietta. The meals are then transported to pick-up sites throughout Cobb County where volunteers pick up the food and deliver them to shut-in seniors.

Eventually, Senior Services will find another site to replace the Windy Hill Senior Center. Linda Parrott, Cobb County Senior Services manager of operations, said that the deliveries would not be affected in the meantime.

“Even if we have to sit in the van in the parking lot until the volunteers can pick up the food for their route,” she said.

Breeden hopes the Windy Hill Senior Center won’t stay empty for long.

“The plan is to re-purpose it,” she said. “There have been several suggestions from the community. One was for Wellstar to open up clinics for folks who are poor all over the county. Their mission is to get people who are poor who have the sniffles or something more serious than that, but not emergency-type things, out of the Emergency Room where you don’t have a three, four hour wait to see someone.”

The property that the Windy Hill Senior Center sits on was given to Cobb County by the federal government and cannot be sold outright.

“That’s a little bit down the road,” Breeden said. “We’re still kind of waiting for the dust to settle.”

Stevenson said she will miss her friends at Windy Hill. She and the rest of her canasta group can’t afford to meet at any of the other senior centers in Cobb County.

“Freeman Poole (Multipurpose Center), with the gas almost $4 a gallon, that’s too far for us,” she said. “The East Cobb Senior Center is much farther away then the Windy Hill Senior Center so we can’t afford the gas to do that.”