Without Further Ado

$20 Million Community Center OK’d, Projected to Open in 2024

A rendering of the Community Center that will be built at 4501 Park Road.

Returning Sea Isle City summer residents gain something more than traditional greetings at the Welcome Center this spring.

They receive welcome news.

The city pushes forth with its recently approved $20 million Community Center, a transformative project plowing through the construction documents phase after being green-lighted by City Council.

A summer bidding process, post-Labor Day groundbreaking, and 2024 opening are projected.

The center will be built at 4501 Park Road, the former site of the Sea Isle City Public School, on land the city owns. The current building will be demolished and the new one will fit in the same footprint, according to Katherine Custer, the director of community services.

The two-floor facility will occupy a full city block and feature a gym, fitness room, conference area, and walking track. The center will also have 86 parking spots and an amenities list that includes a ramp, elevators, lockers, a spacious lobby, and a lounge.

City officials expect it to be used year-round, including weekends and evening hours.

“We hear tremendous excitement from people about what this will mean for them,” says Custer, whose recreational arm of the department – which includes tourism and public relations – will handle day-to-day operations for the center. “This has been talked about for a long time, and many people are happy that the community center is going to come.”

The project cleared some significant hurdles in the past few months.

That included stages of public discussion, tweaks in plans to address residential concerns over its scope, and a City Council that initially voted it down before later approving the project and the bond ordinance.

The center will rank among the most significant revitalization projects ever undertaken here. It continues a run of upgrades to city facilities in recent years.

This is the former school building at the Community Center site.

“This is the most expensive building Sea Isle City has ever constructed,” Custer said.

“We have the Promenade, we have the band shell, the marina, Dealy Field, and now we will have something indoors that will be used for athletics, civic meetings, council events, special functions, and even a place to gather if scheduled outdoor events are rained out. We’ve been excited about the center because it is a place for the community to gather, with a lot of space.”

The facility will have two floors and the components to become a community focal point. Custer said the center will present nice aesthetics, offer attention to detail and provide landscaping accent pieces that complement the neighborhood.

Benches, bike racks, trees, slow-rising stairs and a colorful exterior will give the center an identity, contrasting the look of a cold institutional building.

The signature piece will likely be the gym, substantially larger than the one in the old school building.

There will be six basketball backboards and rims, a divider, and a volleyball and pickleball area, for starters. A retractable net can divide the larger court into two smaller ones so that the activities don’t clash.

Nearly 200 bleacher seats will accompany the layout.

Adjacent to the gym on the first floor is a fitness room. It will have the space to coordinate activities like yoga, total body fitness, and senior fitness, among others.

A nearby multipurpose room can accommodate a variety of uses, including large meetings, the Garden Club, perhaps even movies. The area includes a stage that will be approximately 35 feet wide.

A walking track will highlight the second floor. It will essentially make a loop around the gym and have a line down the middle denoting walking and running space. Fourteen loops will constitute one mile, Custer said. The track will be 10 feet wide.

This can be used many ways, including warming up for other exercises and cooling down, or simply as a health routine. It may come in particularly handy during rainy days or cold winter temperatures that will discourage outdoor activity.

A series of developments led to this point.

The public school at the site closed in 2012 because of limited enrollment. Sea Isle City children now attend public school in Ocean City.

In 2012, the city took possession of the property. The building fulfilled an immediate use shortly thereafter, when Superstorm Sandy destroyed the offices of many government departments.

While the new City Hall was being built on JFK Boulevard, the school was home to the police department, clerk’s office, tax collector, construction office, human resources, the courts, and city council meetings.

After the new City Hall opened in September 2015, the school became used almost exclusively for the recreation branch of community services. Late in the winter of 2020-21, the building’s heater broke and was deemed unrepairable. Recreation operations were moved out to Dealy Field.

On a parallel plane, the Community Center idea grew over the years. But it battled headwinds when funding discussions occurred. Concerns over the cost of a $20 million facility for 2,000 full-time residents were raised.

City officials countered that Sea Isle City can have upwards of 70,000 people on a busy summer weekend and that the locals also operate the community which tourists find so attractive.

Regarding financial impact, city officials have estimated that the center will have either no tax implications, or less than $100 on an assessed home of $1 million.

After a town hall meeting in December, a council vote gave the center its go-ahead.

There’s an additional twist to this element.

The city held a valuable wild card by already owning the property, which is the size of a city block, in the lucrative Fish Alley section. The value of what the city owns has been targeted at $15-20 million by adding estimated values for the 16 parcels comprising the block next to it.

Having to buy this kind of land – if it was even available – would likely have doubled the cost of the project and scuttled it.

Plans will be fluid, but Custer said the initial expectation is to not charge people a fee for usage. Visitors signing up for fitness classes would pay the fees for those classes, as they would anywhere, but the facility is otherwise free. That could change over time, perhaps.

Two of the benefits to this project may be intangible:

One, more people will see the center and want to use it as it becomes operational.

Two, it will give Sea Isle City more marquee value in the rental and home-sale markets.