Mancos United takes its rec center case to trustees Wednesday
The group says a feasibility study has been done and that memberships would cover the running costs. The study has not been published, and the town has put no cost on the building.
The Mancos Board of Trustees will spend the first hour of Wednesday evening in a workshop on Mancos United, the community group that is pressing the town to build a recreation center — and the group has spent the past few days making its case in public and asking people to turn up.
Mancos United says a feasibility study has already been done. In a statement the group posted in the Cortez What’s Up Facebook group, answering criticism that the proposal amounts to a conventional gym, it wrote: “this is indeed a traditional mini rec center, but the feasibility study was done in response to community demand.”
The group’s argument is less about sport than about having somewhere to go. It describes the building as a “3rd space” — “an intentional space where people from all walks of life connect in low stakes ways,” the statement says, adding that “this can offset the divisive rhetoric and actually bring communities together.”
It then lists who it thinks is going without. “We also have community members who get memberships to the Cortez Rec Center just so they can have a place to shower,” the statement says, and others have no reliable way to get to a neighboring town. Seniors have their own center but “also want a space where they can interact with all ages.” Young parents want somewhere indoors for their children in winter. And teenagers, the group writes, “have to go to Cortez to hangout at Walmart and McDonalds just to have a place where they can hang with each other.”
What the group concedes
The statement is candid about the obstacle, which is money. “But the Town is legitimately stretched and it’s a huge project,” it says.
Its claim is that running the building is the easier half: “It’s feasible to operate (memberships will cover the costs), but it will take everyone’s involvement and connections to find a way to build it.” The group closes by asking people to come to the meeting — “So if you are at all intrigued, please come Wednesday night.”
Those are the group’s figures and the group’s reading of its own study, set out in its own post. The Cortez Current has not seen the feasibility study. It is not among the documents the town publishes on its agendas and minutes page, the town has not posted it to its news page, and neither the town nor the group has put a construction cost, a site or a funding source on the record. What the study assumes about membership numbers and prices — the assumptions that decide whether memberships really would cover operating costs — is therefore not public.
If you want to go
The workshop starts at 5 p.m. Wednesday, October 28, in the board room at Mancos Town Hall, 117 N. Main St. The agenda lists Mancos United as its subject.
One thing worth knowing before setting out: the agenda says workshops are open to the public but are for board discussion only, and that public comment is not taken at them. The regular meeting follows at 6 p.m. and does take public comment, limited to three minutes a person on public hearing items and five minutes on items not otherwise on the agenda.
The regular meeting’s own business is elsewhere — a resolution the town must pass by October 31 to stay eligible for Proposition 123 affordable-housing money, formally accepting a $2.6 million water plant project, a housing needs assessment presentation from Region 9 and a comprehensive plan discussion. Our preview of that meeting has the detail.
The agenda packet for the meeting was posted on October 22 and is on the town’s agendas and minutes page.