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Fraser rec center may be named after Grand Park

Katie Looby
Sky-Hi Daily News

The Fraser Valley Metropolitan Recreation District Board has at least one suggestion what to name its new recreation center.

Grand Park President Clark Lipscomb has requested the district name it the Grand Park Community Recreation Center because the development donated the land worth $4 million to the district.

“If someone had come to the table four years ago and said, ‘I’ll give you $4 million and you give me naming rights,’ we probably would have jumped at it,” said Scott Ledin, district director of parks and recreation.



Ledin said Lipscomb has more “leveraging” now since he made that direct donation. The developer previously had a deal with the town of Fraser that the donation would count as its required five-acre donation to the town. But when the bond failed the deal expired.

When the latest bond passed, Lipscomb asked the town if the donation would still fulfill his requirement, the town didn’t agree.



“When this was a fulfillment of a requirement to Fraser and the land was to come to us through Fraser, (Lipscomb) didn’t have the same leveraging as he has now,” Ledin added. “The leveraging changed quite substantially.”

“It forced Clark to basically make a straight ($4 million) donation if he wanted it to be on his property,” he said.

“Which he is going to gain a lot from,” said district resident Julie Sawyer.

“We’ve had other people donate some significant things to our district without a name, without any naming rights,” said Larry Burks, general manager of Pole Creek .

“We have a golf course that was donated without any naming rights.”

“There are some issues,” Ledin said. “We don’t want it to sound like it’s a private facility.”

The developer sent the request to Ledin last Friday. It stated that he wanted the center called the Grand Park Community Recreation Center or a mutually agreed upon name, Ledin said.

The letter requested that the board approve the name Tuesday night, he said.

The board decided instead to send the request to its district lawyer and to hold a workshop next week to discuss names along with their options. They will invite Lipscomb to be a part of that discussion.

Budget growing

The latest construction estimate came in from Big Valley Construction at $11.25 million. The estimate came in significant higher than the previous estimate, partially due to Grand Park requests for the exterior of the building to be changed and because of material costs rising.

Authorities said they would need to do about $845,000 worth of value engineering to offset the adjustment.

They are talking about cutting the multipurpose room and space for the climbing wall to cut costs.

Big Valley’s originally estimate was $246 per square-foot, now that number has jumped to $251, said Austin Watson, who is with ARC Program Management out of Boulder.

The center is about 47,000-square-feet.

Now that the contractor has more details his estimate has changed, he said. Part of this is due to the exterior building requirements Grand Park has given the district.

Increases in oil, fuel and steel also contribute to the rising cost, Watson said.


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