Columbia reviews activity centers
Association considers closing some neighborhood facilities because of costs
The Columbia Association is examining whether to close or find new uses for more than half of the planned community’s 14 neighborhood activity centers.
The private group runs many of the Howard County community’s resident programs and services in Columbia, including the centers.
Considered an important facet of Columbia when the community was founded by Jim Rouse 50 years ago, the centers were originally designed to offer day care co-op programs as well as convenience stores, swimming pools, parks and playgrounds.
Dennis Mattey, the association’s director of open space and facility services, recommended in a memo last week to board members that one center in Columbia’s Long Reach village, Locust Park, be demolished in fiscal 2020. He also recommended shutting down seven others, saying that “the neighborhood centers present a substantial capital and operating challenge” to the group’s financial resources.
“It is not a question of whether or not the neighborhood centers are used, but rather whether or not the long term capital and operating expenditures add commensurate value to the Columbia community,” Mattey wrote.
The association’s board is being asked to consider turning the Running Brook and Faulkner Ridge neighborhood centers into pool bathhouses, replacing replace Stevens Forest and Jeffers Hill neighborhood centers with “passive parks” and taking three others — Talbott Springs, Longfellow and MacGills Common — out of service.
The April 5 memo did not discuss cost estimates for maintaining or improving the centers, which average 45 years in age. Mattey wrote that over time the co-op centers have given way to for-profit day care centers. Nine of the current centers have day care operations; one houses a Montessori school.
The recommendations were to be discussed at an association meeting Thursday evening, but spokesman David Greisman said in a statement that no action would be taken at the meeting.
Greisman said in the statement that as a “strategic initiative for the president/CEO for fiscal year 2018,” the association board had asked staff to review the 14 neighborhood centers “using a number of criteria, including the cost and benefits of maintaining them. The study and its recommendations are now coming before the CA Board for the first time.”
Word of the recommendations sparked concern in some neighborhoods. Rebecca Palmquist, board president of the co-op preschool Wilde Lake Children’s Nursery at Faulkner Ridge neighborhood center, said the move is “confusing,” as the center was renovated in 2013.
Alisa Holbert, who serves on the board of the Oakland Mills Nursery School at Thunder Hill neighborhood center, said she’s concerned by the lack of consultation the association has had with the centers’ tenants.