Garage a security boost at West Central Community Center

A $42,000 gift from Spokane’s Northwest Neighborhood will help the West Central Community Center stop the slashed tires and siphoned gasoline that have plagued the center for years.

Coupled with unused funds from an earlier expansion, the center should have a new garage before next winter.

“It is amazing, generous news. It just shows how valued the community center is,” said Kim Ferraro, the community center’s executive director. The center serves the Emerson-Garfield, West Central and Northwest neighborhoods.

Victor Frazier, chairman of the Northwest Neighborhood, said the neighborhood council unexpectedly found itself with the $42,000 after federal criteria changed and a sidewalk repair project had to be scrapped. The project was funded by the federal Community Development Block Grant program, but updated poverty statistics for the neighborhood deemed the sidewalk repair ineligible.

“We were just thinking of turning it back to the city or federal government,” Frazier said. “The center was looking to build a garage. … Here’s a need. It was a shovel-ready project. It was already on the books. It was an easy decision.”

Ferraro said the center has sought funding to build the garage for years, but struggled to find the $75,000 needed to construct it. After the neighborhood promised $42,000, the center contributed $20,000 in funds left over from its 2006 expansion. Last week, Jonathan Mallahan, director of the city of Spokane’s Neighborhood and Community Services Division, told the city it would deliver $15,000 in community development funding.

Over the past few years, Ferraro said the center’s vehicles – which include some retired Paratransit buses from the Spokane Transit Authority – have been vandalized. The vehicles take kids enrolled in the center’s youth programs to school, as well as transport people in the center’s Women, Infants and Children program, and its developmentally disabled members.

“There have been repeated vandalisms: siphoning gas, parts being taken, tires being slashed,” Ferraro said. “It’s really been a hindrance for us to do our programs effectively.”

Currently, the center’s vehicles are parked as close to the center as possible, where cameras can watch over them. But with low light and practiced criminals, Frazier said vandalism is still commonplace.

When the four-bay enclosed garage, as well as extra storage space, is completed, Ferraro hopes the theft and destruction will abate.

“We have storage units that are repeatedly broken into. They’ve taken a snowblower, a vacuum,” Ferraro said. “We caught the young man that did it, but he had done it twice by then. We’re hoping the garage will be done before the snow flies.”