Sports Center to reopen soon
MONTEREY >> Thanks to $2 million the city of Monterey tucked away for city services reopenings, its Sports Center is set to open its doors a crack shortly after the county drops into the Red Tier on Wednesday.
The center will open at only 10% capacity because of the protocols outlined in the California Department of Public Health’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy. Monterey County is currently in the purple — or “widespread” — category, but all indications are that the county on Wednesday will drop in the red tier — or “substantial” that will allow for limited reopenings.
No firm date has been set for the partial reopening, but it will happen by March 29 or sooner, city officials said.
City Manager Hans Uslar said Monday there are several challenges in reopening city facilities like the Monterey Free Library and Parks and Recreation activities. One is the revenue picture remains cloudy at best.
The city has lost more than $30 million since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent recession, so budgetary constraints will be a factor in reopening. Sales tax revenue continues to be disappointing, Uslar said. One of the impacts of the pandemic is the transition people have made from brick-and-mortar purchases to online buying.
A purchase at a physical store generates more revenue for the city than online buying. It used to be cities would get no sales tax revenue from out-of-state retailers like Amazon. But in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can collect sales tax from online retailers.
Known commonly as the “Wayfair law” after the online retailer that was the defendant in the Supreme Court case, it provides for sales tax collected from online retailers to be pooled into a county fund since there is no tracking system for points of delivery in specific cities. That pool of money is then distributed to that county’s cities as well as the county itself.
But the formula that is used to distribute how much and to whom isn’t perfect. In the case of Monterey, the city receives 80 cents out of every dollar it would collect in sales tax from brick-and-mortar stores. In other words, Monterey gets 8% of the pool while Salinas gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%.
So the shift in consumer buying habits is costing the city revenue it could use to hire back more people, one reason Uslar and others in the city encourage people to return to physical stores as soon as it is safe to do so.
The city has redistributed exercise equipment in the Sports Center to provide a safe environment in which to exercise. For example, cardio equipment has been moved into the gym, and are spaced between 10 feet and 12 feet apart.
The swimming pool will also reopen at the limited capacity and only for certain activities. Assistant City Manager Nat Rojanasathira explained the state allows for “drowning prevention” activities in the Red Tier. So while swim classes — seen as drowning prevention — can be held, open public swimming is not.
Another challenge is the city has no way to determine how many members of the public will return to the Sports Center based on an individual’s comfort level, so at the start, it will struggle to determine how many staff to bring back. Initial estimates are between 50% and 60% of members will initially return once the county continues to move down the tiers.