Christensen Inc. of Tumwater should begin work on the Activity Center/Gymnasium on the north end of the Les Gove campus this month.
Auburn City Council members voted on Monday to award Christensen the contract worth $2.9 million.
The scope of work calls for:
• The new 9,910-square-foot activity center/gymnasium, providing a place for activities such as basketball, pickle ball, volleyball, dance, exercise and indoor soccer for all ages.
• Numerous site improvements to the nearby Parks, Arts and Recreation Administration building (PRAB), among them, two required restrooms and a new sprinkler system.
• An integrated climbing wall and canopy connecting the gymnasium to the Auburn Senior Activities Center.
• Reconstruction of the existing access driveway and parking lot to provide 69 parking spaces and room for 28 future spaces.
• Building of an exterior concrete plaza to connect the south side of the Activity Center/Gymnasium, the PRAB and Senior Center, providing outside activity and relaxation space and access to the climbing wall and bike racks. The plaza will provide access to the Les Gove Park walking paths.
Daryl Faber, director of Parks, Arts, and Recreation for the City of Auburn, said that the PRAB will one day be turned into a teen or youth center. But he added that those improvements aren’t included in the present contract.
When work is completed on the community center on the south end of Les Gove Park, the Parks, Arts, and Recreation department will move there, Faber said. But for now, staff will remain in the PRAB. Work there is expected to begin in 2011.
The total for the activity center and PRAB improvements is actually $3.8 million, but the City has already spent $900,000 on preliminary design work. The City’s partner in the PRAB project is the Boys and Girls Club.
“Early on we talked to the Boys and Girls Club about a partnership and to split the costs 50/50,” said Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis. “We wrote out a grant for the Boys and Girls Club to send to the state for $785,000, and they got it as part of their participation. State Sen. Claudia Kauffman asked for that money, and she did an outstanding job. We are going to write another grant. So we will have the Boys and Girls Club and other non-profits in there that will program out the space. When the Boys and Girls Club gets all their contributions in, they will run it.”
Plans for the Les Gove Community Campus also call for a 20,100-square-foot, $8.9 million community center on the park’s south end.
City officials originally had proposed building the community center first in the summer of 2010, but economic realities forced them to reshuffle the construction plans.
Councilman Rich Wagner, chairman of the Community Center Committee, said last November that the overall funding proposal is to draw from multiple sources, while leaving the taxpayer-supported general fund that pays for most of Auburn’s daily operations untouched, as follows:
• $3.3 million real estate excise tax. Anyone who sells real estate in the city pays this 0.25 percent tax, and the City can use the money for construction only. Sellers must pay additional elements of the tax, some of which have fewer restrictions on their use, but most of that goes to the state. The City has received about $1 million in revenue each year for the past 10 years, but during the recession it is receiving about half of that. For the past eight years, the City has put most of that amount into a savings fund for a community center.
• $500,000 from solid waste utility fees. For decades, the City maintained a $1 million reserve in the solid waste fund in case the contracted garbage collection company failed to perform, for example because of labor strikes. The City kept the reserve so it could operate its own collection service for a period of time if that proved necessary.
“It has been determined that $500,000 is sufficient to allow for this contingency,” Wagner told the Reporter. “Since all Auburn citizens have paid into this solid waste fund through their garbage bills over the years, and all of the Auburn citizens will benefit from the community center, it was determined that this fund transfer made sense to return value to the citizens rather than keep an abnormally large reserve fund.”
• $3,500,000 worth of new market tax credits (NMTC). This is a complex federal “grant” process wherein a bank makes a loan for the project that the City does not have to repay. Instead, the federal government allows the bank seven years worth of income tax credits so it can recover the cost of the loan plus a reasonable amount of interest. Through the terms of the NMTC program, the City and or a newly created NMTC ownership entity will own the property and build the community center and activities center.
“It is a complicated process, and it is not a done deal yet, but it has great promise,” Wagner said.
• The Boys & Girls Club contribution which is 50 percent of the cost of construction.
• A Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Section 108 loan of up to $2,033,715 to help build both projects.
Wagner said the City would repay the HUD loan at $150,000 a year over 20 years using the $400,000 it receives through annual community development block grants (CDBG). The CDBG funds have to be used for construction of community facilities.
Based on population, CDBG has been a source of about $450,000 per year for the past 10 years, and that amount is expected to climb to about $600,000 when the federal government takes into account Auburn’s newly annexed populations.This allows $150,000 to be used for the loan repayment without reducing the amount that local non-profit agencies like Auburn Youth Resources have historically received in funds from the City’s CDBG allocation.
Based on how the final plans shake out for both the community center and the activities center, the City can choose to accept or decline the loan even after the application is submitted and HUD authorizes the loan.
