‘No room in the inn’ for the Quota Club’s loan closet

Metaphorically, it is a cruel irony that an organization that helps usher in the Christmas season in Estes Park and provides a volunteer service to the community is finding there is no room in the inn for them.

Come Friday, the Estes Park Quota Club’s lending closet – a durable medical goods lending program that provides hospital beds, wheelchairs, commodes, crutches, and other equipment free of charge to residents and visitors – may be homeless, save for a last-minute miracle.

In 1949, years before the town had a hospital, the Quota Club was formed to raise money to purchase an ambulance that could take people down the hill in an emergency.

The year after its founding, the organization purchased the first of 21 ambulances through fundraising efforts.

In 1952, the year that Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency, and the U.S. tested the first hydrogen bomb, the Quota Club established a lending closet and served 27 individuals.

In 2025, the program served 454 people who checked out 724 pieces of medical equipment, said Vicki Wright, Quota Club president.

Until 1975, the lending closet operated first out of private homes and then out of the old school, before moving into the basement of the new hospital. According to Peggy Lynch, the loan closet’s co-chair, the hospital had an unfinished floor for years. Risers, pallets, racks, and hangers had to be built to lift the equipment up off the dirt floor to keep it clean.

In 2013, the hospital allowed the Quota Club to relocate the lending closet from the basement to one of its townhouses on the hospital campus.

For more than 12 years, the location worked well and allowed easy access to store and move the loan closet’s equipment.

In 2025, however, all that changed as Estes Park Health prepared for its acquisition by UCHealth. Estes Park Health required the lending closet to move out of the townhouse and into the garage of an old house at 163 Stanley Circle on the hospital’s campus.

Part of the house was supposed to serve as the headquarters for the Estes Park Health Foundation, which was being moved out of the hospital building to make way for UCHealth offices.

Estes Park Health poured a new concrete walkway and a parking pad next to the Stanley Circle house, which the hospital was also using as a duty house for its maintenance staff. The hospital installed new electrical equipment in the garage, made other improvements, including shelves and racks, and provided the manpower to move the Quota Club into what was supposed to be its new home.

The old house, however, was zoned for single-family residential use and not as an office for the EPH Foundation or as a storage facility for the Quota Club’s loan closet. Someone contacted the Town to complain that the Stanley Circle house was in violation of its zoning.

On Jan. 14, the Town’s compliance officer gave the Quota Club a written notice of violation of the Estes Park Development Code. The organization was given 15 days to correct the violation of vacating the premises. The written notification stated that the Quota Club was operating a “business” even though the nonprofit organization does not charge for the use of the equipment in its loan closet.

“We do collect a deposit on equipment that we loan, but that is returned to the borrower when they are done with the equipment,” said Linda Polland, the loan closet chair. The 501(c)3 organization raises funds through its annual Festival of Trees event during the holiday season, which is held at The Estes Park Resort and Spa, Pollard said.

Members of the club reached out to the hospital administration, Estes Park Mayor Gary Hall, Town Administrator Travis Machalek, and Kara Washam and Steve Careccia in the Community Development office to see if there was a solution to the dilemma. The Quota Club was given an extension to February 14.

Although the hospital has tried to find the club a new location on the hospital campus, including allowing the Quota Club to move back into one of the hospital’s townhouses, the building would need to pass an inspection for occupancy. And there are some physical problems with the building – including the fact that an internal firewall had been removed at some point without proper permitting. This alone would cause the property to fail inspection.

According to Lynch, the unit would need significant remediation and permitting to allow the Quota Club to occupy it, a process that Lynch, Polland, and Wright said could take months.

During a site tour of the property on Sunday afternoon, members of the Quota Club told the Estes Valley Voice that it was not likely the organization would get the permits that are needed or get them by Friday the 13^th.

The loan closet coordinators are scrambling to find an affordable property zoned commercial or commercial outlying with between 1,000 and 1,400 square feet of space, preferably a garage type location, with water, heat, and a bathroom, where all of the durable medical equipment – some 624 items including wheelchairs, hospital beds, walkers, crutches, toilet risers, and shower seats – can be moved.

Ideally, the location would provide easy, safe access for the club’s volunteers and the public, so hospital beds, wheelchairs, and other heavy items can be brought in and out without difficulty.

Organizers are hoping against hope that the stars align over the next few days and that the right property becomes available so the club can continue to do what it has been doing for 74 years — providing a needed service to the community.