A flood of community support has enabled the Meeteetse Senior Center, at risk of closure due to a lack of funds, to be able to stay open for at least the next year.

Center board chair Bill Wiltse vowed they’ll find a way to continue to stay open after that as well as they look at more ways to increase funding.

“We’re pursuing a whole bunch of options, from grants, to a tax district, seeing what we can do to raise funds locally,” he said. “We’re planning on staying open, we’ve just got to figure out how to do it.”

Wiltse, who only recently took over as chair of the Meeteetse Senior Center Board, said the center needs roughly $35,000 per year to run and in the past hadn’t done much advance planning with the budget, to the point that recently they’ve run through their reserves as revenues haven’t kept up with rising expenses for staff, food and such.

The first problem, he said, was solving immediate cash flow crisis, “make sure we keep the lights on.”

They also prepared a preliminary budget for the next fiscal year, but no matter what they did, they came up $20,000 short.

“The good news is we have several people working to provide income via raffles,” he said. “A whole bunch of local people donated something, and we have one new family, they really live in Texas, who provided a grant to cover our minimalist budget for next year. It kicks the can down the road and we need to figure out fiscal year beyond next year. [But] It’s looking better than it did.”

It’s looking so good that early last week he was able to announce to the Meeteetse staff that, despite the rumors, they would be staying open.

“We just have to work on these possibilities to generate money going forward,” he said.