City, Wayne County Public Schools look at plan
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on June 23, 2015 1:46 PM
In light of a growing need for meeting space and gymnasium access throughout Goldsboro, the city is sizing up a possible agreement with Wayne County Public Schools that would provide the necessary facilities.
In exchange for after-hours use of gymnasiums, fields and rooms at the schools, the city would maintain several city school ballfields.
Parks and Recreation Director Scott Barnard came to last week's City Council work session to discuss the details of the possible agreement.
The schools included in the joint-use agreement would be Greenwood Middle School, Dillard Middle School, Carver Heights Elementary School and Wayne Academy.
Wayne Academy would only be available in the summer, Barnard noted.
Maintenance of the ballfields would cost the city about $75,000 per year, Barnard said, and Parks and Recreation would be responsible for maintaining an additional 30 acres of field space.
Barnard said an agreement between school systems and parks and recreation departments are foundational building blocks upon which other programs across the country have built their athletic programs.
"Many of us grew up playing baseball on school baseball fields and basketball in school gyms," he said. "That's the way it's typically done across the country and across the state."
Barnard said Goldsboro has not been taking advantage of the opportunity, but that agreements of the same nature were in place roughly two decades ago before being phased out.
Work on the proposed agreement presented to council began three years ago, Barnard said.
"What we would like to do is enter into an agreement with the school system where we take on the operational cost, or the maintenance, of fields along the perimeter of those schools in exchange for the use of those school buildings after school hours," Barnard said. "Most importantly we would be getting access to those indoor spaces and gymnasiums."
Barnard also told the council that by entering into the agreement, the city would be able to save money by using the school spaces instead of absorbing the cost of using its own spaces.
"It's a lot cheaper for us to use and manage somebody else's gym space than it would be to use ours," Barnard said.
Barnard said the Herman Park Center's Grey Room is one of the most popular rental spaces in the city.
Tim Rose, who usually books the room, said it was rented out 107 times between June 2014 and June 2015.
"It's booked for everything you can imagine," Barnard said, adding it is used for everything from band performances, to middle and high school dances, to weddings and line dancing events.
Barnard said he likes to call the room a "cafe-gym-a-torium."
"It's almost something. It's not good at being anything specific," he said. "It's nothing fancy or distinguished unless the decorators that rent it make it that way. It's what you would want if you only had one place to rent in the community."
Barnard said the room is rented out as far as four to five months in advance, and the only way a last minute booking happens is if a party cancels.
The increased demand for rental space in the community and the move to enter a joint agreement with Wayne County Public Schools is "indirectly related," Barnard said.
"These are separate types of rental spaces we're talking about," he said. "They're indirectly related, but we're moving towards gaining access to the gymnasiums because some of the ones Parks and Recreations has have some issues. Some of the ceilings are too low for certain sports and things like that."
Many sports teams throughout the city sometimes have issues getting access to a gym for a practice space, a problem the joint agreement could alleviate if it is adopted by the City Council.
"It makes sense to me as a taxpayer to share existing spaces that taxpayers already pay for," Barnard said.
City Manager Scott Stevens said city boards and commissions do not use private rental spaces, such as the Grey Room or the Wayne Center, for their meetings.
"We take care of those meetings with our existing office space here in City Hall," Stevens said.
Stevens added that the intention of purchasing the Goldsboro Country Club was to ease some of the strain of the large demand for rental space throughout the community.
"We get a lot of calls for wedding receptions at the Grey Room and at the Paramount Theater, so by adding the Goldsboro Country Club, we'll be opening it to a larger market," Stevens said. "My understanding is that you used to have to know a member or be a member to have a reception there, but that will no longer be the case since the city owns it."
And while rentals will remain in high demand once renovations to the country club are finished, the city will be banking on it becoming a wedding venue for it to be worth the cost of purchasing it and renovating -- a cost of approximately $1 million.
"We never sold it as paying for itself through rentals," Stevens said.