I hope we don’t need any metal siding on the new Indoor Pool
l3wis Here we go again, wanting to hire a risk management company that keeps all the contractors secret and skirts responsibility. Yeah! (Item #38)
Sioux Falls Parks and Rec
UPDATE: What will become of the old Ice Recreation center once the new Iceplex opens?
UPDATE: I have been thinking about this for a few days. I have been trying to access the informational meeting on the city website, but no luck. The video died about a minute into the meeting when it was LIVE and they have not yet posted it to the website. Once again, SIRE isn’t working and no one at Carnegie or City Hall is doing anything about it. Go figure. Anyway, I did have a South DaCola foot soldier attend the meeting. Parks & Rec Mob Boss Don Kearney did a presentation on saving the Rec Center (I partially agree with him, but we will get to that in a moment). Of course the stuck-up IcePlex crew showed up and cried about competing with the new facility. This could be true, and they do have a point, the city kicked in $1.5 million to the new facility, and why would we want to continue to subsidize the old Rec Center?
I think there is a solution that can make everyone happy. Let’s say we close the Rec center. We have only a few options. Tear the whole place down and just sell the land. We could use it as a Parks garage. Or we could just sell the place ‘As Is’ with the ice and throw in the Zamboni. I like this idea the best, first off, it wouldn’t cost taxpayers anything to sell it ‘as is’, secondly we wouldn’t have to continue to subsidize it, either as ice OR as a garage. I would also put a condition on the sale that the place that buys it (Private health club or non-profit) can either remove the ice, tear the whole place down, or what I think would be the best use make it into a recreational ice facility, much like Caurosel Skate. Use the facility for strictly ice skating and curling, etc, but not ice hockey unless it is adult leagues.
One of the reasons the Ice Association wanted a new bigger facility is because they claim there isn’t enough inside ice, keeping the old Rec Center as a private ice facility won’t hurt their business. That’s like saying Wild Water West hurts the outdoor pool business in SF Parks. There is room for two ‘different’ kinds of ice facilities in Sioux Falls, and the taxpayers can be off the hook for once.
Images below are from Don’s presentation to the city council. Click to enlarge.
The city better tread lightly with the indoor pool and negotiations with the VA
I found this article yesterday very timely, concerning Spellerberg Park and the Quit Claim deed with the VA;
A developer who mistakenly built a $1.8 million waterfront house on parkland has been ordered to remove it.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court found that the Narragansett home was built entirely on land owned by the Rose Nulman Park Foundation, and therefore must be removed.
The developer, Four Twenty Corp., began building the home in 2009, but it didn’t discover the error until 2011 when it tried to sell the house and the prospective buyers got a survey. Robert Lamoureux, who owns the company, then contacted one of the park’s trustees to try to work something out, but she told him the land was not for sale, according to Friday’s opinion.
The foundation was set up to preserve the property as a park in perpetuity. A 2008 agreement among the family members says that if the trustees allow the land to be used as anything other than a public park, they must pay $1.5 million to New York Presbyterian Hospital.
The developer argued it should not be penalized for an innocent surveying mistake. The court said it was sympathetic, but it said the park’s property rights outweighed that. It also said it was in the public’s interest to keep the land as a park.
I hope the city either has a rock solid agreement/contract with the VA or has the quit claim deed torn up before they even turn one shovel at Spellerberg.
Imagine that!? Kid’s like to swim outdoors
But hey, outdoor pools are a waste of money, even though attendance at them will probably blow away any attendance at an indoor pool.
More people have attended the Sioux Falls Pools this past month compared to years past.
In the month of May, the Sioux Falls Aquatic Facilities had a record attendance with 30,691 visits compared to the previous record set in 1988 with 23,999 visits.
This past May they were 13,000 visits ahead of the five-year average of 17,500 and 25,000 ahead of last year’s attendance. The recreation program coordinator says this is their second season of using the electronic swim passes, which allows family members to enter the pool by using a key fob.
Family swim passes sales have been a huge success with more than 1,500 new pass holders registering and approximately 2,100 renewals so far this season.
Probably a good thing we have the outdoor pools, we will have to find a way to subsidize the indoor pool somehow.
Another thing I noticed over the past couple of days, our sewer rates are going up to pay for all the blowups and explosions we have had over the last couple of years. Too bad we didn’t have $11 million dollars laying around to help with those infrastructure upgrades . . . wait, sewer pipes are not as fun as indoor swimming pools.