POWELL BUTTE Powell Butte residents may soon have a new place to gather.

The Powell Butte Farmers/Community Club is planning a new community center for the area, complete with a dance floor, meeting rooms and soccer field.

”We don’t really have a central gathering place for everyone in the community,” said Diane Umbarger, a member of the Farmers/Community Club board. ”It will be something for this day and age.”

The Farmers/Community Club an organization that brings together residents for such things as lectures, political debates and dessert socials now meets in an older building that once functioned as the Powell Butte grange hall.

The building, which is on the corner of Highway 126 and Reif Road, has a poor septic system, no direct water line and not enough parking, Umbarger said.

”It’s just too old,” she said.

While the new building is designed to look like a traditional barn, the community center will have more modern amenities.

The club is building the new center on 40 acres of land, which it owns, on the corner of Weigand and Reif roads.

Board member Kathy Eby said the proposed 6,400-square-foot building will include a kitchen, meeting rooms, a dance floor and a stage, with a soccer field outside.

Eby said she hopes the building, or at least the exterior, will be done sometime this year.

Basketball courts and even a swimming pool at the center are possible plans for the future, she said.

”I see this as a gathering place for families,” she said.

Local clubs, like the 4-H or the Boy Scouts and other organizations would be able to rent the meeting rooms for functions. And the Farmers/Community Club would hold its monthly meetings there, as well as other social events.

”This is a traveling community a lot of people live here but work elsewhere,” Umbarger said. ”And it can be hard to meet people because everyone’s so far apart.”

The two women agreed that the center will be a way for Powell Butte residents to connect with one another, and a provide a spot to do so.

In fact, even the construction will be a community effort.

The club has been working on the project for about four years, Eby said. During that time, almost 150 people have volunteered to help with the construction, offering everything from labor to equipment.

A local landscape architect, Eileen Obermiller, did the preliminary drawings of the community center, and the board is now waiting for the final designs to come back from the architects. The project will then go out to bid in the next couple of months, Eby said.

Kelly Kearsley can be reached at 541-617-7814 or kkearsley@bendbulletin.com.