CONWAY -- The City Council is set to decide June 23 whether to buy a former mobile-home manufacturing facility to convert into a community center -- a proposal that has evoked some concerns among leaders of two civic organizations.
Mayor Tab Townsell has proposed paying $3.5 million for the 22-acre site, which includes a 5-acre, vacant building sitting across Dave Ward Drive from a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Conway's west side.
During a City Council meeting last week, aldermen discussed what they would prefer to include in the facility if they buy it and informally decided against an ice hockey rink and a health club.
The city has hired Nabholz Construction Services to study such questions as whether the building can be retrofitted to include a large pool.
Townsell said he would, however, like to see an indoor aquatic center that features an Olympic-size pool with bleachers, tennis courts, a turf field for sports, a climbing wall and rentable meeting and party rooms. Other ideas aldermen liked, he said, were an indoor water park, an indoor playground and a therapy pool where people also could learn to swim.
Townsell said the monetary advantage of buying the Spirit Homes land instead of building an aquatic center and other recreational facilities from scratch is that the city would need a large piece of property for such a center.
"We can do something very similar with Spirit Homes for probably less money," he said. "But even if it's equal money, the benefit of Spirit Homes is [that] we get so much more building to do other things with."
He said zoning issues can become problematic when building a recreational facility from scratch.
And if the area is already zoned for commercial use, he said, "the raw land is priced at a point that it's more expensive for raw land than this is or land with a building."
Spirit Homes once used the now-vacant building to manufacture mobile homes. Cavalier Home Builders LLC now owns the property.
Townsell called a swimming pool "the single missing, gaping hole in our park system in Conway."
Even so, the mayor acknowledged that his proposal has "absolutely" met more opposition than he had expected -- some of which is focused more on the location than the idea of a pool.
Since April, former mayoral aide Jamie Gates, senior vice president of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce and the Conway Development Corp., has twice emailed Townsell and aldermen with questions about the proposed purchase.
In an April 14 email, Gates said the chamber's executive committee had voted "to encourage the city to slow down the decision-making process on a city pool and specifically purchasing Spirit Homes."
Almost a month later, aldermen voted for a 45-day feasibility study, which Townsell had initially opposed.
In the email, Gates added, "The chamber's preferred course for city government is to evaluate alternatives and opportunities citywide to meet the goals established in Conway 2025," a long-term, strategic plan for the city.
"This includes water park amenities, but not at the cost of almost all other parks goals. We can support a city pool and/or other amenities and not support the purchase of this property," Gates added.
Gates said committee members thought the city should look at other locations.
In a May 12 email, Gates said the board of directors of the economy-focused Conway Development Corp. and the chamber's executive committee had met to discuss the issue. Questions included projected operation costs and what alternative sites have been considered.
In an email reply to Gates, Townsell wrote, "You do know if your organizations wish more information on the Spirit Homes opportunity, all they have to do is invite me.
"I have not yet received an invitation to any meeting and the Chamber Executive Board has met twice. I even had to ask for the opportunity to speak to the main Chamber Board meeting which many of the Executive Board members did not attend," he said.
"Again, I see the main Chamber Board is silent on the issue."
Townsell said later that he thought the groups' questions were "disingenuous."
"It presupposes in my mind a slant against" proceeding with the project "from the start," he said.
Townsell, Gates and Brady Lacy, the chamber's president and chief operating officer, agreed in separate interviews that the organizations normally work well together.
"Conway is a much better place to live and do business because of his [Townsell's] leadership and the council's," Lacy said Friday.
Of the mayor's Spirit Homes proposal, Lacy said, "We haven't taken a position opposing it. We're asking questions that we think are just important to consider and are hearing from people in the business community.
"I don't know anyone I've talked to that isn't supportive of a public pool," Lacy added. "I think our question is, 'Do you need to buy a 220,000-square-foot building to put a pool in, or should you just look at a pool?'"
"The people that we're talking to are concerned that we're going to buy a big building and then try to fill it up with things versus looking at what are the recreational offerings that we want as a community and then deciding how to do those things," Lacy said. "The question that some people have is [whether] Spirit Homes is the right spot" and what other options might there be.
State Desk on 05/24/2015