A clash between town officials and a volunteer organization that has traditionally managed the Barkhamsted Senior Center has led to a revolt, with the volunteers walking away from the senior center after the town announced it was taking over operations and reportedly locked them out of the building and their Facebook page.

An independent volunteer organization called The Barkhamsted Seniors has traditionally managed programming at the Barkhamsted Senior Center, which the town leases from the State of Connecticut. The organization hosts lunches on Tuesdays and breakfasts on Thursdays, but that came to a halt when First Selectman Nick Lukiwsky delivered a letter to the organization on September 17, advising them that former First Selectman Don Stein would be taking over as an unpaid director of the senior center and that the Board of Directors would now be a “Board of Advisors.”

“The Director will have decision making authority for day-to-day decisions of the center,” Lukiwsky wrote in the letter. “My intent with this decision is to improve the quality of service you can expect from the Barkhamsted Senior Center and make it a center for community engagement.”

Lukiwsky says he made the change because he didn’t feel it was appropriate for an independent group of volunteers to manage the facility and felt it was time for the town to take control of its own senior center. He also says there were concerns that not everyone was being given equal access to the senior center.

“I decided it was time for the town to be running its own facility and not by unsupervised volunteers, but by supervised volunteers,” Lukiwsky said in an interview. “So, we made the decision to make the announcement to Barkhamsted Seniors and to the town that our intentions were to make this facility open and available to other organizations that wanted to use it.”

“It’s a lot of money we spend on a place that doesn’t get a lot of use,” Lukiwsky said. “But it serves lunch one day a week and breakfast one day a week and just sits dormant the rest of the time. That kind of irked me, that we weren’t doing more.”

The town’s move to essentially dissolve the board of directors and make Stein the executive director, however, did not go over well with the volunteers, who ceased all activity at the senior center, cleared out boxes of privately owned materials, and began holding their breakfasts and lunches at a new location, causing a rift between town leaders and the longtime volunteers.

Dave Roberts, who has been president of Barkhamsted Seniors for the last five years, says for the last 34 years the volunteer organization has worked in the senior center because the town lacked the resources for a paid staff and that “it has worked fine,” all those years. 

“We have never told anybody they couldn’t use the senior center,” Roberts said, adding that the Women’s Club, the Lion’s Club, the veterans, and the American Legion all use the facility. Roberts says they only denied political meetings at the center; “For as long as I know, we’ve never allowed political activity in our center.”

Roberts says following Lukiwsky’s letter, they held an emergency board meeting, and decided they would not work for the Town of Barkhamsted, would not work for paid staff, and did not want any tax dollars being used to staff the center when they had been doing it on a volunteer basis for so long.

“We basically said we’re going to leave,” Roberts said. “We did not quit. We just said we’re canceling all our events and we’re not holding them at the senior center until this issue can be resolved.”

The volunteers immediately began to remove “tens of thousands of dollars’ worth” of items the independent volunteer organization had purchased and stored at the senior center. Lukiwsky states he sat in his car and filmed the removal to make a record of what was taken to check if any of it was town property. Roberts insists it was all privately owned by The Barkhamsted Seniors. 

Lukiwsky says he’s “very shocked” by the reaction of The Barkhamsted Seniors, saying he never tried to stop the group’s activities at the senior center, just that he wanted more town oversight of the facility. “Within fifteen minutes, they’re packing up stuff and leaving,” Lukiwsky said. “It was shocking.”

Reached for comment, Stein says the goal is to make it a senior and community center, and there was never their intention for the Barkhamsted Seniors to leave. “We just thought it was time we formalized the town’s relationship with the building and increase its uses for the community,” Stein said. “It blew up.”

“There’s a lot of ‘he said, she said,’ going on here,” Stein continued. “It’s a great building and it was always intended to be used for more than just the seniors, but there’s no intention to detract from the enjoyment of the seniors.” 

The Barkhamsted Seniors have begun to hold events at another facility, the first of which saw sixty people show up, according to Roberts. He says the big turnout is “strongly encouraging us to try to resolve the issue and, if we can’t, to replicate what we did at the senior center to a new facility.”

But resolving the issue appears to be a difficult proposition, as Roberts says the town and Lukiwsky have repeatedly rebuffed his efforts to have a “public meeting” on the issue. “They’re not agreeing to that,” Roberts said. “We don’t know why.”

Lukiwsky says the town, with its own volunteers, are now hosting breakfasts and lunches at the senior center and that new groups are coming to use the facility. “That’s great,” Lukiwsky said. “I want to see it used more.”

“It’s a town building. It’s maintained by town finances,” Lukiwsky said. “The town is going to exercise its right to utilize it to its full potential and that wasn’t the responsibility of Dave Roberts or anybody else to do.”

“Our bottom line is we want to resolve this issue. We are a top-rated senior center, we have all kinds of groups we had to cancel – the Women’s Club, the Garden club, we had a lantern making event, we had a holiday event,” Roberts said. “We’ve had to cancel everything because of this and it’s really sad and many of our members are upset about it.”

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