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Park City wants to demolish City Park building, redevelop site

Community center will be built as blueprint for corridor advances

The recreation building at City Park would be torn down and the site redeveloped as part of Park Citys overall vision for the lower Park Avenue corridor. City Hall wants to build a community center at the site that would house senior programs and a summertime day camp.
Jay Hamburger/Park Record

Park City officials are considering demolishing a building at City Park and then redeveloping that piece of ground with a community center, one of a series of projects the municipal government intends to pursue along the lower Park Avenue corridor.

City Hall could tear down what has long been known as the recreation building. It is located close to the City Park softball diamond and used for a range of purposes generally connected to City Hall’s recreation programming.

Officials, though, are pursuing an ambitious development and redevelopment plan on lower Park Avenue, where City Hall has extensive land holdings. Some of the projects are a part of the municipal government’s aggressive housing program. The City Hall-owned Park City Senior Citizens Center, located on land between Empire Avenue and Woodside Avenue, is one of the parcels that will likely be redeveloped. There have been questions about the long-term future of programs for senior citizens once the parcel is redeveloped with housing.

Jonathan Weidenhamer, the economic development manager at City Hall, said the location now occupied by the recreation building at City Park is of interest as the wider designs for the corridor are considered. If the building is demolished, he said, a community center could be built there.

A new facility could then house senior programs in addition to the summertime day camp that the recreation building now houses. He said the senior programs and day camp could each have space dedicated to their own needs with the possibility of shared space as well, such as a commercial-grade kitchen.

A report drafted for a December meeting of the Park City Council about the project described a “community center that will house the summer recreation program and senior uses as ‘anchor’ users of a shared, community flexible space.” The report outlined the increased space for the day camp beyond the 78-person limit on campers now. It says the Park City Recreation Department could also schedule activities like wellness programs and obedience classes for dogs. The report also provided a rundown of programs for senior citizens, including space for lunch for up to 120 people twice a week, a kitchen and storage space.

Weidenhamer, meanwhile, said the construction will require moving the City Park playground to the north, toward the softball diamond, from its current location to accommodate the new facility.

City Hall recently started a search for a consultant to design a project at the recreation building site, engineer the project and serve as the construction administrator. The deadline for submittals is March 7.

Weidenhamer said officials want to hire a consultant in March and have designs prepared in May or June. Construction would begin in the fall of 2018 under the City Hall schedule. The project is anticipated to involve a building of between 18,000 square feet and 20,000 square feet in size. City Hall has set a budget of $4.5 million.

The timeline roughly parallels the plans for a housing at the current site of the Senior Citizens Center. That project is anticipated to start in the spring of 2018. He predicted the people who use the Senior Citizens Center will not have a site for approximately 1 ½ years as the current location is redeveloped and the project at the recreation building site is underway. He said solutions are under consideration for the senior citizens like leasing temporary space for programs or shifting them to the Park City Library during the work.


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