H-S: Walltown rec center creeps forward

In case you missed it this weekend, the H-S' Ray Gronberg had an interesting story about the Walltown rec center, a project funded out of the 2005 general obligation bonds, but which has, like so many of the bond issue-backed projects, moved slowly off the starting line.

Fear not, Durhamites -- the City Council is set to review the project proposal sometime in June, before the Council takes its annual one-month break. As with the multimodal transportation center last year, the Council will be asked to approve the structural steel order to lock in one of the most inflation-sensitive parts of the budget.

The design has shifted to a single building from the previous two-building design that would have preserved room for a pool between the two facilities; instead, any such pool will be an add-on to the single, larger building down the road.

The center is running past its June 2009 opening date, Gronberg notes, but only by a couple of months, it appears.

Meanwhile, the City is still negotiating deal points with Duke over the sale of the former Trinity Ave. YMCA to the municipality to become another central Durham rec center, this one featuring a pool from day one.

The site, currently in use as Duke's diet and fitness center, is the subject of appraisals being negotiated between the university and the City, with the two parties "discussing deal points again," according to the latest capital projects update. Still, the CIP report notes that "both parties want the sale of this property to the City to be accomplished" -- we'd suspect in no small part due to the paucity of other likely buyers and users of the old rec center.

We didn't get to spend too much time talking about it on Sunday night's "Shooting the Bull," but City Councilman Eugene Brown brought up the well-traveled ground about the center's history after I noted that the rec center appears to be a case of a project slowed down by the current development process, under which street closures have to be resolved by the City Council to appear at a public hearing.

Ted Voorhees' team has proposed allowing City staff to move the street closures to a public hearing item without the Council first addressing the matter in a work or other session, a step that could save four to six weeks from the process. (We suspect this will be one of the few widely accepted parts of the development review discussion.)

As it happens, the street closures are another element on the agenda for this Monday night's Council meeting -- in this case, having only been on the work session agenda last time around, on May 8, suggesting not too great a speed bump this time around.