FORT SMITH — Fort Smith officials plan to revive a dormant building in north Fort Smith into a community center to offer indoor recreation for children and adults.
The city directors voted Tuesday to buy the old Belle Grove Center at 622 N. Seventh St. from Girls Inc. for $107,500. City Director George Catsavis voted against the purchase.
“We can’t keep going into debt in this economy,” Catsavis said after Tuesday’s meeting.
Parks and Recreation Department director Mike Alsup said the department plans to spend another $150,000 to replace the roof but that most of the renovations would not begin until about 2015.
He estimated it could take $1.4 million to renovate the 16,000-square-foot building. Repairs include water damage from the leak in the roof and replacing the plumbing for the indoor swimming pool, he said.
Girls Inc., which owns the building, has not used it for several years because of its deteriorated condition, executive director Amanda Daniels said. Most recently, she said, Girls Inc. offered to sell it for $299,000.
The offer hadn’t attracted any takers, Daniels said, so Girls Inc. had scheduled an auction for next week to sell it.
Daniels said the Girls Inc. board agreed to sell the building to the city for $100,000 because it could not estimate what the building would sell for at the auction. She also said the city had the resources to renovate the building and put it to use for the public’s benefit.
The other $7,500 in the city’s purchase price is to pay the contract the organization signed with the auctioneer.
Alsup said that the building would become one of the few public indoor recreational facilities in the city and believes it would be well used.
“It will open quite a bit the opportunity for programming of all kinds of activities,” he said.
Already, he said, groups have contacted him wanting to use it. A church group would like to use it for its education/recreation program and the canoe club wants to use the pool for wintertime kayak training, he said.
Money from the oneeighth percent sales tax approved by voters last year will be used to buy thebuilding and pay for its eventual renovation, Alsup said.
The purchase and roof repair will take money from the construction of two softball fields at Ben Geren Regional Park scheduled to begin this year, he said. It will delay the completion of the fields, he said, for three or four months, from the fall until the end of 2013.
He said his department also had leftover operating and maintenance money from last year that could go toward the purchase and repair costs.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/09/2013