Plans for a Northeast recreation center got their first major workout this past week.
Neighborhood leaders met with architects for the first time to begin the long process of figuring out what the area’s newest community center and athletic facility will look like.
The plans are still preliminary, but neighborhood leaders say they are very impressed with the already long resume of designed recreation centers from SFS Architecture.
With several community centers already under their belts, officials from Old Northeast Inc., who have taken a lead role in bringing the community center to Northeast, seem confident that the project could break ground as soon as next year.
“We are looking at a very fast timeline that will mean we could break ground as soon as this time next year,” Ron Heldstab said.
In the coming months, neighborhood leaders and city officials will meet with architects and continue to outline what they would like to see in the new recreation center that will be built at the corner of Ninth Street and Van Brunt. Although officials said they doubted that a pool would be included, they remained optimistic that there would still be some kind of outdoor track and a soccer field involved in the project.
Later in the process, residents will even get a chance to sound off in the project voicing their own needs as architects plan to hold several open forums where all residents will be invited.
“We want this to be something that everybody in the neighborhoods get to have a say in before we move forward,” Heldstab said.
Although plans sound promising in the coming months, officials are still concerned that the funding needed to back the project has not yet fully been identified. This summer, the recreation center project was given more than $3 million — after making an error that promised more and then cutting back — and has slowly collected several thousand more. But officials at the city and within the parks and recreation department have said that a project this large could cost the city close to $12 million or more. But Councilwoman Sharon Sanders-Brooks, in several neighborhood meetings and elsewhere, has told residents that she is committed to finding the money needed to get the recreation center constructed for Northeast.
