Marshall White Advisory Board about to close a City Recreation Center | Local news

OGDEN – After seven months of work, officials from the city-appointed Marshall White Center Advisory Council and four subsequently formed subcommittees say they are nearing consensus on the 53-year-old community center.

In a submission to Ogden City Council, Edd Bridge, head of the Ogden Recreation Division, said the Marshall White Committee will make a number of recommendations to Ogden City Council for a possible future redesign of the recreation center by the end of June.

In the hope of gaining a detailed insight into the community, which has to do with the central landmark of Ogden, the city filled out the nine-member advisory board at the end of October 2020. Subcommittees that limited their focus to things like policy and procedure, outreach, programming, and conservation.The legacy of the center was later created.

The formation of the board arose from the ongoing puzzle between the city and the community center – namely what to do with it in the future.

Built in the 1960s on the western edge of downtown Ogden, the Marshall White has long served the city’s low-income residents of racially and culturally diverse backgrounds. The city has been reviewing options for the center since March 2018, when the pool closed after officials discovered large cracks in the surface. Initial estimates suggest it could cost more than $ 2 million to bring the pool back to life.

In the three years since the pool closed, Marshall White users have regularly asked the city to move forward to resolve the issue. However, Mayor Mike Caldwell and other members of his administration said the high cost and opportunity to open a new YMCA facility has raised a big question mark about the future of the center.

In the seven months since its inception, the advisory board has held meetings with the Ogden Diversity Commission, conducted a comprehensive community survey to gather views on the center, and consulted regularly with center stakeholders and other interested organizations such as the YMCA, Boys & Girls Hit Club, the NAACP’s Ogden Chapter, the Ogden Weber Community Action Partnership, Latinos In Action, Latinos United for Education and Civic Engagement, Weber Human Services, and more.

The board also worked closely with Salt Lake City-based VCBO Architecture, which completed an in-depth technical review of the condition of the community center.

Brent Tippets, director at VCBO, recently told Ogden Council that Marshall White would need a significant amount of work to continue serving the Ogden community.

According to Tippets, the centre’s parking spaces are vastly undersized, and the heating, air conditioning, lighting and other mechanical systems are near the end of their useful life and would need significant improvements to make the building reasonably energy efficient. The building also has inadequate insulation and much of the masonry is cracked. Overhauls would also need to be made to meet current accessibility standards for federal law governing Americans with Disabilities.

Tippets said the pool is unlikely to be a beginner in terms of renovation as not only is the pool itself seriously damaged, but the walls and roof surrounding it are in very poor condition and during a significant seismic event could collapse.

As the name suggests, the advisory board’s recommendations are not set in stone for either the council or the Ogden administration. But on Monday, Caldwell said he was looking forward to studying the group’s results next month.

“The first thing we always look at is cost and whether or not everything that is recommended is feasible,” said the mayor. “We want to know what the greatest need is and then measure everything we do in terms of return on investment. But we’re going to put all these recommendations on the table and put our heads together.”

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