To the Editor:
After years of negligence in school maintenance, the city is now faced with the daunting task of renovating and rebuilding 12 of our schools at a staggering cost of $1.5-plus billion. It boggles the mind as to where those funds to maintain and renovate schools were finally allocated. Regardless of how the funds were squandered it is now time to begin the process to improve out school infrastructure so we can improve our academic standing. I have never been a big infrastructure guy — however our infrastructure is so damaged — a healthy infrastructure with adequate space, functioning utilities, windows in classrooms and standard facilities will greatly aid academic performance.
The first school on our list of rebuilds is Patrick Henry, a school which will be enlarged from 667 students to over 900 students. A school located right smack in a neighborhood and we need to expand its capacity by a third. The neighbors desired three things:
To limit bus and car traffic on Latham Street.
To keep as much of the well-used open space as possible.
To have the school fit the neighborhood in architectural design and location.
So what happened?
In September of last year the recreation department decided it was in the neighborhood’s best interest to drop a 30,000-square-foot, city-serving recreation center on the neighborhood, three and a half times larger than what was previously present. According to Parks and Recreation staff, it would be outsourced for revenue, meaning we will rent it out a lot to pay for it. Bottom line: More congestion in the neighborhood.
Within a period of less than one month, the rec center options were presented to the community and it then came before the City Council for a vote. Councilman Smegberg vented his anger at a City Council meeting stating that whoever was a part in planning this project should be fired and the process needed to be redone. Now cut to 18,000 square feet, this proposal might seem like a victory but no — the center is still too large at twice the size of what was there and grows to 30,000 feet when the shared space with the school is included. It mimics a city rec-center not a neighborhood rec-center. It does not belong in a residential neighborhood. its operating budget is too expensive and its cost keeps growing.
Most recently the city and neighbors seemed to have reached a compromise with option A which incorporates no bus routes on Taney, but also includes a larger recreation center than is needed for the neighborhood, less open space and a “high use athletic field” that may be turfed, with no ban on future lights. The field currently at Patrick Henry is not a high-use field — some soccer and some lacrosse — it is a neighborhood field and as such should remain so.
Recently the Planning Commission and Moseley architects surprised the community when they developed and presented the new A.1 plan — a prototype of option A but with bus routes on Latham. The School Board, in its Thursday meeting, blasted the plan to allow buses on Latham.
My questions to the citizens are: Who is running this project? Why are the residents being ignored? Why would you want to devalue the neighborhood property values? Why do we build for rental revenue to pay for a rec-center when we can build to scale and build what we need and can afford? Is every renovation project going to be like this?
The project is a debacle and an embarrassment. We need to start over and get it right.
William A Goff
Board Member, Seminary Hill