Rec plan review needs to reflect what's gone before

It was encouraging to see the way the reconstituted post-election city council came together to pause work on a major new municipal recreation complex for some soul-searching reassessment.

The council deserves credit for a collegial and realistic approach, clear-eyed recognition of the needs we’re facing and commitment to finding a way to move forward responsibly. We publicly advocated for such a pause ourselves, citing for two compelling reasons:

A bond issue of such magnitude — $152.5 million — would be hard to pass in the best of times. And with a pair of controversial tax hikes having just helped elect a new mayor on an austerity platform, these did not seem the best of times for such ambitious ventures.

That said, the needs are real and no amount of nostalgic wistful thinking is going to will them away.

Our sprawling red-brick community center was built in 1924 as an armory. It is ill-suited to recreational and community activities, costly to operate and dangerously earthquake-prone. Its age, obsolescence and deterioration push in well beyond the point of cost-effective rehabilitation.

Our cramped and outmoded aquatic center was built in 1956 and last renovated in 1986. It is even less capable of meeting current community needs, and facing even less sustainable repair and rehabilitation demands, despite being more than a quarter-century newer.

In addition, we are facing needs with our parks system and senior center. That’s not to mention our public library, built around a core dating back an eye-popping 112 years.

The coming reassessment should be built on the bedrock of all the dedicated work put in over the last six years by staff, consultants, councilors, citizens and, perhaps most importantly of all, the MacPAC citizen advisory committee. It would be a serious mistake to devalue all the fruits of their collaborative community effort, let alone toss them aside outright.

Fortunately, we don’t need to start back at square one — the citywide facilities assessment commissioned in 2018, which evaluated 57 city buildings encompassing 370,000 square feet. We can start with the blueprint already laid out for us by MacPAC when it completed its work in 2022.

As massaged and refined by the council, that blueprint calls for combining community and aquatic center functions in a new facility on the Miller Property adjacent to Joe Dancer Park. To have any realistic chance of moving forward in the near future, we need to stick with that, even if it needs to be undertaken in separately funded phases.

There is nothing to be gained in pouring good money into obsolete, ill-suited structures dating back half a century in some cases and a full century in others. In fact there is much to be lost — so much so that’s not a prospect worthy of further cost- and time-wasting examination.

The siting issue seems irrefutably settled as well.

There is simply no workable alternative to the Miller Property, which is already available to the city as a bargain-basement cost. Rival Linfield and Wortman Park sites have been ruled out for good and sufficient reason.

Linfield’s trustees have a longstanding policy against selling off land from their treasured endowment base, and would be under fiduciary responsibility to obtain fair market value if they did. Given their site’s highly coveted zoning, location and highway access, that value would be stratospheric, layering on millions when we are trying to strip away millions.

Looking to Wortman would require felling 10 acres of majestic old trees in one of the city’s oldest and largest parks, all to make way for concrete and asphalt. “It would just break my heart to take all those trees down, said Councilor Zack Geary, and to the extent the public agreed, likely a large extent, it would spell doom at the polls.

That makes the mission before us now two-part:

First, identifying places we can eliminate, scale back or delay some elements. Second, establishing workable priorities for the remaining elements with an eye to bringing the whole project along over time.

Perhaps MacPAC could be reconstituted briefly to assist in the reassessment. Its mastery of project history, community input and inner workings could prove invaluable, particularly for newcomers to the process just getting up to speed on the details.

Councilor Dan Tucholsky noted, “When you’re building a house, you don’t always get that house that you dream of. You get the house you can afford.”

Councilor Chris Chenoweth said, “There’s no such thing as a good time, and while I would prefer it 10 years from now … this may be as good a time as any.” Councilor Scott Cunningham concurred, observing, “At some point, we need to move forward.”

That, we submit, is the kind of pragmatism it will take. Onward and upward.