Bid to add field house to new Eastern Greenwich Civic Center plans withdrawn
GREENWICH — The effort to change the proposed plans for the new Eastern Greenwich Civic Center will be withdrawn after resistance from Representative Town Meeting committees this week.
A group of residents had sought to add a field house to the civic center plans, which they said would help address field shortages in town and provide an indoor turf surface that could be used year-round.
But leaders of the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center Committee, said the addition would be “devastating” to the project, potentially delaying it more than a year and adding to the cost.
Under the Town Charter, members of the public can make an appeal to the RTM if they object to municipal improvement status — and initial approval — being given to a project by the Planning and Zoning Commission. In this instance, seven residents, all members of the executive board of the Greenwich Athletic Foundation, filed an appeal over the MI status for the new civic center.
The appeal had been scheduled to be considered by the full RTM on Jan. 19, but committees considered it this week and after finding resistance, Rick Kral, co-president of the GAF, said his group would withdraw the motion because they did not want to stop the project.
“We’re not out here to be opposed to what has been developed at this point and the hard work of the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center Committee,” Kral said Wednesday. “This was more of a concern from the GAF that more could be done (with the civic center plans) and that those possibilities weren’t fully explored.”
The appeal did not receive support this week from the RTM’s Parks and Recreation, Land Use, Public Works, Finance or Legislative and Rules committees, with almost all members voting against.
Scott Johnson, co-chair of the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center Committee, said members were pleased to continue moving forward with the ongoing work.
“We were surprised this happened at the eleventh hour,” Johnson said on Wednesday. “It would have been a lot more productive if they had been participating in the process from the very beginning.”
Kral said a representative from the GAF had been at almost all of the meetings to plan the center and had expressed the group’s views since 2018.
The plans for the new civic center were developed over the course of several years. Eastern Greenwich Civic Center Committee members have said they tried to balance the needs of own athletics with the desires of the community to have meeting space and use of the civic center for other purposes.
“We tried to be realistic,” Jonson said. “The most common comment we heard was, ‘Let’s get this done.’”
Kral said he understood that thinking given the long-standing desire for a new facility, but he said it will create additional challenges for the town if opportunities are not taken to add field capacity, which is a listed need in the town’s Plan of Conservation
and Development.
Under the current plan, the existing two-story 31,765-square-foot civic center, which was originally built in 1950, is to be torn down and replaced by a new one-story 35,418square-foot building.
The new building, under the current plan, would include a full-size multi-use gymnasium with rollout spectator seating, 8,100 square feet of multiuse event space and three large activity rooms, two of which would share a partition that could be opened up to create a larger room.
The project has a preliminary budget of $15 million, though that has not been finalized. Kral estimated earlier this week that adding the field house would cost an additional $7 million, which he said the GAF would have worked to offset through fundraising.
Civic Center Committee co-Chair Gary Dell’Abate estimated the cost would be closer to $10 million.