By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Mayor Leonard Desiderio says it will be a community attraction that serves Sea Isle City “for generations to come.”
City Council President J.B. Feeley believes it could very well be the last major public project that Sea Isle builds.
After more than two years of discussion, the city is taking the next step toward developing a new community recreation project that carries an estimated price tag of $10 million to $15 million.
City Council is expected at its meeting Tuesday to hire an architect to develop a preliminary conceptual design for the recreation facility.
The $29,000 contract with Henry Hengchua Architect of Toms River, N.J., will also include a “vision and strategy assessment” to serve as the framework for planning and managing the project.
“This will be important to the overall community,” Feeley said of the recreation center in an interview Sunday. “It’s probably our last major public building. We want to get it right and make sure it’s something we’re proud of.”
Sea Isle is planning to demolish the old public school at 4501 Park Road to make way for the recreation facility. The school, which closed in 2012 due to Sea Isle’s declining student population, occupies the entire block bordered by Park Road, Central Avenue, 45th Street and 46th Street.
“Obviously, we’ll tear the building down and have a clean slate,” Feeley said of the former school site. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”
Sea Isle officials have pledged that the public will be closely involved with the city in the design and planning of the recreation center.
“As we move forward on this project, we will involve the entire community in the planning process to ensure we build a facility that meets all of our needs,” Desiderio said in his annual State of the City message on Feb. 11.
“While we seem to have settled on the matter of building a community center at Park Road, the details of such a project need to be worked out, and it’s important that we take the time to do this right. Like our City Hall, this is a facility that will serve the community for generations to come,” the mayor added.
Up to this point, city officials have spoken about the project in general terms. The hiring of an architect is a formal step underscoring the city’s commitment to build the recreation center. The preliminary designs developed by the architect will be presented to City Council and the public in the next few months to begin collecting feedback.
“Every step along the way we’ll have a rollout to get the public’s input, because they’re the ones who are going to pay for and use this building,” Feeley said.
Feeley explained that the preliminary designs will serve as a starting point to decide how big the recreation center should be and what sort of amenities will be included, such as parking, meeting rooms and the size of the gymnasium.
The facility will not include an indoor swimming pool following overwhelming taxpayer opposition to that part of the project. The indoor pool was rejected in both a ballot referendum and an online survey conducted by the city last fall.
Previously, the city had estimated a recreation center with a pool would cost between $17 million and $20 million, plus an additional $500,000 to $1 million annually to maintain and staff the new facility.
City Business Administrator George Savastano estimated that a pool-less recreation center will cost between $10 million and $15 million. According to figures in Sea Isle’s five-year capital plan, about $1 million will be spent in 2020 to design the project. The capital plan proposes spending $12 million in 2021 to build the facility, although that is an early estimate.
Barring any major delays or problems, construction is expected to get underway in the second half of 2021 and would take about 18 months to complete, putting the grand opening in early 2023, Savastano said in a January interview.
Sea Isle will receive some help from Ocean City as it begins the multiyear process of planning, designing and building the project.
Council approved an agreement in January for Sea Isle to pay $144,000 to Ocean City over the next three years for project management services. Roger Rinck, Ocean City’s project manager, will play the same role for Sea Isle while he oversees the recreation center from “cradle to grave,” Savastano said.
Savastano noted that the same type of shared-services arrangement worked out well when Rinck supervised the construction of Sea Isle’s City Hall in 2015. A new, $11.8 million City Hall was built when its predecessor was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
