Trason Dixon’s desk is sat inside the Park City Senior Center, cooped behind tables of seniors playing dominoes and bridge. His office is the same large room used for tai chi, for chair yoga and, as of last week, for the new line dancing program, too.
Dixon is the senior center’s executive director. He came on in March, and before that, the center didn’t have a director, certainly not an office for one. With no door, no walls, no privacy, Dixon leads amid the commotion of the center’s extensive community programming, which has ramped up as membership has more than doubled in the last few years, reaching 650 members, up from about 350 in 2022.
“I wear a lot of hats,” he said. “In some respects, I’m doing the job of an executive director. In some respects, I’m doing the job of a program manager and, in some respects, I’m doing the job of an administrative assistant or a front desk personnel.”
He’s the senior center’s sole employee besides some support staff from the county. You won’t catch him complaining, though.
“Every day there’s a new challenge presented,” he said. “But I really like this job because every day feels like a project. It feels like we’re really building something big. I can tell you, I’m never bored here.”
Dixon’s crowded, makeshift office is one of many ways the senior center has plainly outgrown its current building just south of Library Field at 1361 Woodside Ave. Though there’s a potential site for a new building just down the street — the Mawhinney Lot across from the Park City Library — it could still be a ways off, and meanwhile, the center is grappling with a lack of resources and uncertainty about who will take responsibility for its future.
Park City Councilor Tana Toly grew up going to the center; her great-grandmother was one of its early members after the city in 1977 picked the building up and brought it over wholesale from Keetley, a ghost town since submerged in the Jordanelle Reservoir. Park City owns the property and worked out a cheap, 99-year lease of the building with Park City Senior Citizens Inc., the nonprofit that helps run the center alongside the city and Summit County.
The center has long been a priority for Toly, and even so, getting to this moment of designing a building and choosing a location has taken a long time. She estimated it’s been about eight or nine years since discussions started among the parties, and different plans have been bandied about. For instance, a previous City Council considered combining the senior center with the City Park building being remodeled now.
That project stalled. Then COVID happened. When Toly was elected in 2021, she ran on the senior center as a campaign item. In 2022, the city formed the Gray Ribbon Committee, comprising senior center members, Toly and other city staff members, to focus on pursuing a new center.
“We’ve spent a good three years working on this project, everything from schematics to, you know, we’ve all visited senior centers all over,” Toly said. “I’ve visited senior centers in Salt Lake, visited senior centers in Jackson Hole, in Colorado. We’ve been really trying to find what is going to work for the seniors.”
That process at one point included a center concept with senior housing and affordable housing, Toly said, which got so far as a request for proposals and involved a developer. However, in December, the city decided to move on from a housing and center concept and turned its eye toward building a new center on the Mawhinney Lot.
The City Council allocated $122,000, according to Dixon, to work with Salt Lake-based firm Sparano + Mooney Architecture to put together a design for a center on the lot. The senior center’s committee is currently working with the firm to bring some preliminary design proposals to the City Council meeting on Thursday.
The committee is answering fundamental questions about how the senior center would occupy the site. How would the building sit? Would there be green space? Where? Above or below-ground parking? Can the site still provide overflow parking for the library? How many rooms? What will they be used for? For now, the working design is roughly four to five times the size of the current building, 15,000 or 16,000 square feet versus 3,200 square feet.
The Mawhinney Lot is an auspicious site for its proximity to the current center and its size. Currently serving as overflow parking for the library, the lot at one point was the home of a car dealership and a bus stop when Toly was a child. The lot as the site for a new center would also provide the ability for the seniors to stay in their current location during construction of the new site, Toly said, as opposed to tearing down the current building and putting a new one on the same land. The current 1361 Woodside Ave. site could then potentially become senior housing down the road.
Craig Weakly is a member of the senior center, its board of directors and the new site committee. He said one of the things they’re pursuing is a dining hall that can accommodate 100 people. Right now, about 35-50 people come for lunch, but that number is certainly growing given the demographics of Park City, he said.
According to Dixon, lunches are the crux of the center’s services.
“It’s the thing that people most rely on here,” Dixon said. “… It’s an opportunity for seniors that may not have deep social circles outside of the center to really come together and be part of a family here and dine together.”
And the benefit of a social space is not to be overlooked, a lesson COVID made stark, according to Weakly.
“I understand there was an increase in suicides among elderly people, especially elderly men here in Summit County, during COVID, and isolation, I think, can be identified as the main issue there,” Weakly said. “We want the new center to be open five days a week, and the meal tends to be the cornerstone of the program. And then we build on either side of the meals, in the morning and afternoons, a significant amount of programming as well.”
That programming includes a weekly walking club, a Ken Burns documentary hour, puzzle time, a book club, legal advice clinics and even bus trips to the much-loved Maddox Ranch House in Brigham City.
The lunches also help combat food insecurity.
“Frankly, even here in Park City, even here in Summit County, which is a wealthy community, there is food insecurity,” Weakly said, “and so the meals do provide a real service in terms of providing a nutritious meal.”
Lunch is the best venue for socializing, Dixon said, but thanks to chefs Summit County employs, the food is pretty good, too. Dixon would know: Before working as the senior center’s executive director, he worked at Harman Senior Recreation Center in West Valley City as its recreation and program manager.
“We had a full staff,” Dixon said. “We had four individuals to oversee programs, as well as a director. We also had a kitchen manager and then multiple individuals to man the front desk.”
Park City Senior Center, by comparison, is completely run by part-time staff and volunteers.
“Our center is bare bones compared to nearly every other senior center in Utah in that we don’t have a full, dedicated staff,” Dixon said. “I don’t think most people truly understand just how unique our center is … We’re not an entity of either a city or a county.”
The nonprofit, city and county split the management of the center. There’s a lot of overlap and collaboration, he said.
Park City Municipal provides financial support and grounds maintenance, like snow removal. Summit County provides money, too, as well as some staff, such as Jair Ramirez and Jorge Ramirez in the kitchen, and Annette Rockwood as an administrative assistant. They also help at the Kamas and Coalville senior centers that Summit County runs by itself.
Then, the nonprofit entity, Park City Senior Citizens Inc., has a board of directors and volunteers who have stepped up to help in various capacities. The nonprofit status helps with funding through pursuing grant money and donations. Since May, Lisl Wangermann has worked as an independent contractor for the nonprofit to secure grants. Dixon said the center has received $40,000 since then. Live PC Give PC last year brought in about $30,000.
“This year we’ve set a lofty goal of $50,000, but I think a more conservative goal would be to reach that $30,000 mark,” Dixon said. “Donations are instrumental in keeping this place vibrant and lively and fun and making sure we have programs going on here,” Dixon said. “Currently, we have a membership fee, but it’s $10 a year, so it’s very much not cost-prohibitive.”
The partnership approach makes the senior center possible but creates limitations. The center only has funding to open four days a week, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Thursday, with lunch served only three days a week. The only staff are part-time, and Dixon is the only person fully dedicated to Park City’s senior center.
All three entities are pitching in, but Dixon said it’s not enough to meet the community’s needs, which will only become greater.
“Given our membership growth, the fact that we have programs going on at all hours of operation … There’s a tremendous amount of demand (for a senior center) in this town, which I think, as we all know, is aging,” he said. “We have very much a senior-focused population in this town. Demographics will speak to that.”
With rising membership, limited resources and volunteers stepping up, there’s not just a need for a new center; somebody needs to take ownership, Dixon said.
Ideally, from his point of view, the center would ultimately fall under Park City or Summit County’s purview and could do away with the nonprofit component. While grants are useful for funding the current center’s operations, Dixon said it would be better to have a reliable and consistent source of funding, particularly given the amount of community utility the center provides.
“We’re lucky in a lot of ways that we have so much help and support,” Dixon said. “But at the same time, I think we all know that, to continue growing and turning the center into a center that mirrors the type of senior center you might see in Salt Lake, that we still have a lot to do. We have a lot of growing to do in terms of our partnerships with both the city and the county.”
Long term, he said, the only reasonable direction is to be absorbed by either the county or the city because they have the means to provide a full staff and budget.
Toly said that the new center could be a moment to redraw some of the lines of ownership over the center. Building it is the first priority, and the practical reality of how that shakes out will lay the foundation for the city’s senior services for the next generation.
One option could be for Park City to build a shell building as though it were creating a commercial space, then make a deal with the seniors nonprofit or the county to complete the interior according to their needs.
The new site committee need to finalize a design, which will also mean settling on a cost. Once that’s known, questions about ownership may feel more realistic.
Toly added that the city is looking to have the county as a partner in the building. The county said it will likely continue to support the Senior Center in a similar partnership to the existing agreement, but that it hasn’t finalized the full details. The county’s budget for 2026 does not address the senior center itself, only ongoing senior programs and services.
Weakly said the goal is to have shovels in the ground by 2026 and have the new building open in late 2027, maybe early 2028. Everyone’s eager to get it done, he said. Thursday’s City Council meeting will move the needle forward as Sparano + Mooney Architecture lays out preliminary ideas of building placement, parking options, site layout and cost.
Maybe that can include plans for an office for Dixon. Whatever happens, he said he hopes the new center is just the beginning of how senior services in the area will grow.
“As far as our board of directors and myself, we really feel like it’s time that Park City has a good infrastructure that supports its senior citizens. And ideally, the senior center will be a cornerstone within that equation,” Dixon said. “But I think we need to keep building up the entirety of our senior services in this town, even beyond the senior center, to really get it to where it should be.”