The City of Soldotna is pleased with the amount of input it’s received on the Soldotna Regional Sports Complex expansion.
Brigham Young University student Rex Shields is pursuing a masters degree in Public Administration and interned with the city this summer. He took on the expansion project and launched a user group survey which has garnered over 50 responses so far.
Shields: “The idea right now is to have an indoor field and track around it, it would be ideal to have the turf removable and have some courts underneath for basketball and volleyball. One of the things that I have found through the surveys is that there is a great shortage of gym space on the Kenai Peninsula. Especially during the winter months, everybody is trying to compete for time in the schools and so some extra gym space would be greatly appreciated for those groups and we just want to accomodate as many user groups as possible.”
Shields spent the summer with Soldotna’s finance department investigating what the potential operating costs and revenues will be.
Shields: “Since it is an expansion of an existing sports complex, the operating costs are significantly reduced than if it was its own stand alone facility. A lot of the overhead is already being taken care of by the existing Sports Complex, things like office supplies, telephone, snow removal, things that the new field house won’t have to pay for because the existing sports center is already taking care of that stuff. Also the staffing, which is a major part.”
The city has yet to decide if the expansion will be a “brick and mortar” type facility or an air supported facility like the Alaska Dome in Anchorage.