King County Boys and Girls Club looks to expand

Organization bids to occupy rec building once city’s community center is built

The Boys and Girls Club of King County signed a tentative lease with the City of Auburn for the Parks, Arts and Recreation administration building at 910 9th St. S.E.

Whether the organization actually expands into the building from its current operation in the Firwood Circle apartment complex, however, will depend on state grant money that would help the city turn the structure into a Teen/Tween Center. Tween refers to kids roughly between the ages of 6 and 12.

That project, which will include an attached gymnasium to the west, is part of the city’s overall community center project.

City officials said they realized months ago that owing to rising construction costs, they could not afford to renovate the building and construct the gym at the same time the 22,000-square-foot center goes up on the opposite end of Les Gove Park.

Mark Pursley, director of special projects for the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County, said his organization signed the lease to put itself in the running for two grants totaling $800,000 that the Youth Recreational Facilities program awards under the wing of the state department of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED).

By hitching its aspirations to the Auburn project, the Boys and Girls Club gets a project well advanced in planning, a critical point with the people who will decide which projects get the grant awards this fall.

“It’s really a very loosely-worded document,” Pursley said of the lease. “It was put together in a hurry so we could qualify for grants. If we get grant money from CTED, that’s when we will sit down with the city and really start negotiating what we each want and will do. We are at a very preliminary stage of this.”

When the community center building is completed and ready for occupation in 2010, parks, arts and recreation staff would vacate their current home and move into the new building’s administration wing.

City officials said they do not expect to have the next cost estimate on the multi-million dollar community center project for another three to four weeks.

“It’s too early to say what the city’s financial contribution to the gym-teen-tween center partnership would be, based on the cost of the other improvements in Les Gove Park such as the Community Center,” said Daryl Faber, director of Auburn Parks, Arts and Recreation. “When we know that, we will be able to evaluate how much is left to put to the partnership.”

Pursley said the Boys and Girls Club’s next step will be to conduct a feasibility study in the Auburn community to gauge how much support exists for it to move into the building.

The Boys and Girls Club of King County, which has operated the small site in Firwood Circle on King County Housing Authority property in south Auburn for more than 10 years, has talked about expanding to meet the community’s growing needs and burgeoning population for years.

“There have been discussions with the Boys and Girls Club about finding ways to expand services in South King County even before the community center project started,” said City Councilman Rich Wagner. “There were discussions before we ran short of money, but that accelerated things a bit.”

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