Craig Mayor Dave DeRose has an idea for the soon-to-be shutdown Shiloh Home that he plans to present to Moffat County commissioners at the Monday meeting.

Because the budding Boys and Girls Club program doesn’t yet have a home, members from the steering committee say the former juvenile facility east of Craig off Highway 40 might make a good match.

“I’d like to run a test program for the Boys and Girls Club during every school district in-service day,” DeRose said, as a start to getting a local presence for the club. “We don’t have a charter yet but if they let us use the facility, we won’t have to look for another one.”

The Boys and Girls Club organizing committee hopes to have an after school and weekend program for youth in place by June 2004.

The organizing committee has set its sights on getting a portion of the $80 million in grant money earmarked for the establishment of 1,500 new Boys and Girls clubs throughout the nation.

“I want to get as much of it as we can for Craig,” Pres Askew, a member of the steering committee to establish a local club, has said.

Askew estimated a Boys and Girls Club would need $100,000 to $150,000 to start up. One drawback of the plan was finding a facility that could house the program.

Moffat County’s Shiloh Home is set to close on Aug. 25 because of a lack of funding related to taking in too few clients. The all-male juvenile facility replaced the Moffat County Youth Care Center that closed in 1999. At the time of its closure, the Youth Care Center housed only one resident.

County commissioners have stated they won’t replace the Shiloh Home with another youth care center because of the “drain” on county dollars.

“We would like to see another company come in,” County Commissioner Marianna Raftopoulos has said. “We couldn’t make it in the youth care center business.”

After news of the imminent closing of the Shiloh Home began to circulate, DeRose said the ideas from the local Boys and Girls steering committee started “a feeding frenzy.”

“When this came up we thought ‘Well, here’s a facility that isn’t being used,'” he said.

Amy Hatten can be reached at 824-7031 at ahatten@craigdailypress.com.