Friday, January 07, 2000
Fire-damaged center to reopen
Springdale expansion lags further
BY SARA J. BENNETT
The Cincinnati Enquirer
SPRINGDALE — The Springdale Community Center is expected to reopen Tuesday morning, more than two weeks after fire damaged two meeting rooms and set back completion of an expansion already behind schedule.
Registration for spring and summer sports, meanwhile, will take place Saturday and Tuesday as scheduled. It will be in the rotunda of Springdale's municipal building.
The Dec. 23 fire started when sparks from a pipe-cutting saw ignited a solvent used to remove carpet in a section of the building under renovation.
No one was injured in the mid-morning blaze, but damage was extensive. Portions of the ceiling were destroyed, and the entire building had smoke damage. No damage estimate has been released, but City Administrator Cecil Osborn told city council Wednesday that damages could be “in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The fire will set back completion of an $8.1 million ex pansion of the community center, Assistant City Administrator Derrick Parham said. The project, which at its April 1999 groundbreaking was expected to be completed by July 31 of this year, already had fallen eight to 11 weeks behind schedule.
That delay is being blamed on labor shortages and difficulty reaching agreements among architects, contractors and others involved with the project. Calling the expansion “the project from hell,” Mayor Doyle Webster said he was trying to set up a meeting with everyone involved to discuss cutting through some of the red tape.
Mr. Parham could not estimate how many weeks more the fire would delay the project.
Although the community center has been closed, staff have continued to work out of the municipal building's basement. Basketball games were relocated to facilities in Sharonville and Evendale.
The center should reopen with all programs in full swing, said Jim Burton, parks and recreation director. Staff already had planned to be without the two damaged meeting rooms while they underwent renovation.
Mr. Parham said talks are under way with insurance companies for the expansion and renovation project's general contractor, Mardis & Meehan Construction, and subcontractor King Wrecking Co. Inc. about paying for fire repairs and clean-up.
Meanwhile, everyone is counting a blessing: that no one was hurt.
“It's been a real setback for us in terms of the (expansion) project itself,” Mr. Osborn said. “But looking at the big picture, I think it's better that everyone was able to escape without injury.”
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