By Ray Gronberg
gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- Facing tight capital budgets, a bill that could approach $11 million and a likely on-site parking crunch, City Council members appear inclined to shelve the idea of adding a swim center to Walltown's park.
Members sat through a briefing on the project Thursday and at the end said nothing to countermand a recommendation from General Services Director Joel Reitzer that they hold off on earmarking capital funding for it.
One member, Diane Catotti, said "it just doesn't make sense" to build an aquatics center on a site that, like Walltown's, would have so little parking that it couldn't host school and team swim meets.
The debate left the project in limbo, with City Manager Tom Bonfield saying afterward that "without further direction from council" little more would be done.
Thursday's presentation gave members a chance to hear from the center's would-be designers, from the Raleigh-based firm Cherry Huffman Architects.
Firm principal Dan Huffman and designer Eric Sowers ran through an assortment of design possibilities, ranging from an outdoor lap pool that would cost an estimated $4.3 million to an indoor facility geared for kids that would cost around $10.6 million if the council wanted it built to be energy-efficient.
But the problem with the site, Huffman said, is that it's hemmed in by floodplains that are off-limits for buildings and more parking.
A new gym is taking up a good bit of the usable space on the property, which borders West Club Boulevard and Guess Road. The architects figure they could add another 37 parking spaces to the site, along with an addition to the gym that would include 11,436 to 17,370 square feet of floor space.
Huffman said the same type of swim center on another site would typically have 100 parking spaces, "maybe more."
His assessment of the site as "fairly tight" was actually more generous than Reitzer's. The General Services boss said he would call it "extremely challenging," because there's so little remaining usable space on it that construction workers would even have a hard time finding elbow room for materials and equipment.
The unspoken budget issue Thursday was that while the city's 2009-10 capital plan included $1 million for design work on a swim center, it didn't have any money in it to build one.
And Bonfield's recently announced plan for paring down the city's long-range construction program to what administrators term a "fundable" level, in light of recent budget problems, wouldn't change that.
A Walltown swim center didn't appear on the list of projects the manager and his staff think should receive funding in the next seven fiscal years, or on a separate list of projects they think could someday be worth putting on a new bond issue.
Reitzer said in a memo given to the council before the meeting that he thinks the Parks and Recreation Department should look for other sites before seeking capital money.
During Thursday's work session, he told council members Cherry Huffman's work to date had cost the city only about a tenth of the money they'd previously reserved for the design effort.
At least one Walltown activist, however, signaled that she's not giving up on the project.
Resident Ernestine Hooker urged officials to look for off-site parking, perhaps at Northgate Mall, to supplement what designers think they can build on site.
Hooker said neighborhood residents prefer an indoor to an outdoor pool. She also urged members to consider adding a "baptismal pool" to any such facility to increase the chances of church groups renting it.
