Several weeks after the school board issued a resolution regarding its neutral position on whether a new community center should be built into the west wing of the ISD 166 school complex, the school board and the county board met to discuss the issue. Their discussion was in the context of a quarterly joint powers meeting held August 25. Some City of Grand Marais officials attended the meeting as well, but most of the conversation took place between the county board and the school board, with county commissioners trying to find out what the school board thought about attaching the community center to the school.
The superintendent’s view
“I am convinced…that the best place for the new community center is the school,” Superintendent Beth Schwarz said. With student enrollment on the decline, the school has been moving out of the west end of the building to save on heating and janitorial costs. Schwarz said she doesn’t think the school could rent out the entire west wing of the school on an ongoing basis.
In a letter Schwarz handed to the county board at the meeting, she said that if the west wing were remodeled into a community center, she would recommend that they be responsive to community concerns regarding the size and scope of the building but that the facility include two full-size athletic courts appropriate for school varsity sports. She also recommended that the county own, operate, and maintain the facility and that the school lease space from the county as needed.
Current Community Center Director Diane Booth knows how community groups struggle to find gym space when the school is busy with gym classes and ballgames. “Between November and April there is a crunch,” she said, adding that the rest of the year, there is no shortage of gym space.
Superintendent Schwarz’s letter referred to the opinion of some community members that building a new freestanding community center instead of renovating existing facilities would be wasteful.
School board weighs in
A letter school board member Terry Collins wrote to the board also referred to community opinion. He referred to some who object to any new community center facility, saying that he wouldn’t want to attach a new facility to the school if it would alienate people who would otherwise vote in support of another school levy.
School board member Leonard Sobanja said he was concerned that the school could end up with financial responsibility for the community center if it was located on school property.
School board member Jeanne Anderson agreed. If the arrangement would not be a financial liability to the school, though, she wouldn’t be opposed to it, she said. As a member of the Community Center Steering Committee, she visited numerous community centers in Minnesota and saw some school/ community center co-locations that were successful. She added that she was also concerned about security issues with schoolchildren onsite, although locking doors could keep the facilities separate.
“In general I think it’s good to cooperate and combine facilities,” said school board member Mary Sanders. “Our first responsibility is education,” she said, however.
“There has to be no cost to the school district,” school board member Terry Collins said. Some shared costs such as snow plowing and grounds maintenance would be reasonable and advantageous to the school, however, he added.
Do we need this? school board member Deb White asked. She said they need to look at whether the community can sustain operation of a new community center. The city got stuck with paying for the operation of the Grand Marais Municipal Pool, she said, even though it started out as a threeway partnership among the city, the county, and the school. She doesn’t want this to happen to the school, she said. She also wondered what would happen to the current Community Center.
The right combination
The current building was made to be a curling club, not a community center, Diane Booth said. If the county, city, and school all put their existing funding together, a new community center could work, she said, but if they don’t do it right, they might as well do nothing. Cutting too many corners would be “like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” she said. “We’re not going to be getting this 1 percent [sales tax] again [which would fund the project], so let’s make good use of it.”
Booth stated that demographic projections show that Cook County’s population will continue to age unless the county builds living wage industries not based on tourism. She said older populations tend to use pools and walking tracks, two amenities planned for the new facility.
Coming up with the most useful combination of amenities at a cost that will satisfy the community will be a challenge. People complain about the condition of the roads, Commissioner Jim Johnson said, but when they fix them, people complain about the cost.
If a community center were built on school grounds, Commissioner Fritz Sobanja said, they would need to consider what would happen with things like parking and pedestrian safety when big events took place during school hours. If the county and the school form a partnership, he said, what it entails needs to be planned out better than it was when the three-way partnership went into effect when the current pool was built.
The county board has made no decision on where the community center will be built. For now, at least, the school property remains an option.
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