EPHRATA — The Ephrata Senior Center will ride a little better now, thanks to a grant from the Paul Lauzier Foundation that bought the center a new van.

The van replaces a 14-passenger bus, said center Manager Kathy Anderson.

“It traveled so rough that nobody wanted to ride on it,” she said.

The new van will be used to deliver meals within the city limits, as well as picking up and dropping off members and occasional group trips, Anderson said. The van gets much better gas mileage than the old bus did, she said, which means the center can charge less for its services.

“We had to charge according to how many miles we were going,” she said. “Maybe one trip would be $7, maybe one trip would be $25, depending on where we were going. And so the board just came up with, if we’re within a 25-mile one-way trip, then we're not going to charge anything. And if we go further, we're going to charge $5 per person. So it's much cheaper for our members.”

The grant was approved in 2023, and the center picked up the van in January, Anderson said.

The Paul Lauzier Foundation awards grants for community development, youth programs, public health and safety, education and agriculture, according to its website, as well as college scholarships for Grant County students.

“We couldn’t have gotten (the van) without the Lauzier Foundation,” Anderson said.