It’s easy to talk about government needing to live within its means and make tough choices - until it’s our senior citizens who feel the brunt of that.

We know the city administration doesn’t want to close the Ann Arbor Senior Center. But the city’s budget proposal for 2011 would shut the aging facility, unless a recently appointed task force can find a way to avoid that.

Looked at purely on a cost basis, the Senior Center is a financial drain on the city. It serves about 500 seniors at an annual cost of about $150,000, but brings in less than $20,000 in revenue to help offset that.

Of course, the social benefit is harder to put a dollar value on. Many elderly would lead more isolated lives if they didn’t have such a welcoming place to gather.

A task force appointed by the city is considering whether there is a way to keep the center open, or to at least make sure that the services and activities it offers can continue in other, more cost-effective ways.

Though the annual cost of the Senior Center is modest when compared to a popular facility like Cobblestone Farm ($265,000), at least that operation comes near breaking even.

If the task force can find ways to generate new revenue at the Senior Center, that’s worth exploring. But getting the center closer to solvency would be a tall order.

The fact that the center has an endowment of $107,000 and a recent grant of $17,000 from the Ann Arbor Community Foundation provides some money to leverage, but the task force has to ask what it resolves if that money were used to tide the center over for a year or two, only to face the same, hard questions about its viability again.

The task force seems to understand that it must be guided as much by its head as its heart. No one wants to see the Ann Arbor Senior Center close. If there’s a way to avoid that, it falls on the task force members to find it. We hope they do.

This viewpoint was published in today's print edition and reflects the opinion of the Editorial Board of AnnArbor.com.