Board rethinks facilities plan after sticker shock

It sounded like a good idea at the time: See if there’s a way to gather the Grand Coulee Dam School District’s athletics facilities onto one campus.

With that direction from the board of directors, the district hired an architect last spring to look into the possibilities.

Anything is possible for a price, but maybe not one you want to pay.

When the new K-12 school was built with no local debt, funding was not available to include a new gym, and school leaders have been trying to find a way to build one ever since, plus fix other disparities, such as a nearly unusable track at the former middle school with one at the new school.

When the new Lake Roosevelt Schools complex was built, the price tag for added sports facilities was estimated in the low millions. Last week, Superintendent Paul Turner said estimates for including all athletic facilities on the Coulee Dam campus reached into the $50 million range.

Turner, in a school board meeting last week, suggested re-assessing the goal: “Do we need it right here, or should we be looking at a different scenario?”

No one on the school board thought the big cost, up from earlier estimates of around $14 million, was feasible. The high cost would come from moving a lot of dirt and even some current facilities, such as the bus garage.

Instead, the board discussed finding ways to use what they’ve got with less drastic changes. Those might include moving the baseball field up to the middle school, where the softball field already lies; adding track-and-field facilities around the football field. Perhaps sell the current district office in west Coulee Dam and move those offices to the middle school.

Turner asked the board to consider the questions raised and come back to Tuesday’s meeting (last night) to decide whether to take a new direction, but by the end of last week’s meeting, that basic question was all but answered. How to do it is a question to be answered yet, which Turner said several times needs to involve a community meeting.

Board members are planning to take a trip to tour new facilities at the Toppenish School District, which will dedicate them in December.

Last night (Tuesday) the board met again and voted to change to a new strategy that will somehow use both the new campus and what most recently was a middle school, originally Grand Coulee High School, exploring ways to use both sites most efficiently.

None of it is funded yet, but Director Ken Stanger said the district needs to get a plan in place so that when funding is available, it will have a “shovel-ready” project that politicians can accept, the same strategy that put the district in a position to get the new school built a decade ago.