McIntire Park to get overhaul along with YMCA

Charlottesville will overhaul the west end of McIntire Park when a new YMCA is built there next year, adding a soccer field, pedestrian trails and more parking.
But the changes will come at a price: Two softball fields will be eliminated, some green space will be paved and the Dogwood Festival will have to be relocated within the park.
After more than six months of debate, city councilors in December granted the organization 3 to 5 acres in the park to build a 70,000-square-foot athletics and aquatics center — land worth between $1.7 million and $2.8 million. Before determining where the center should go, the city first wanted to remake the western portion of the park between Charlottesville High School and U.S. 250.
The city has finalized the new park plan and will bring it before the City Council on May 19. However, the plan still needs to be refined and minor adjustments are likely, officials point out.
The YMCA center, which will cost $15 million, will be built west of the parking lot that sits just north of 250, on land currently occupied by two picnic shelters. The adjacent two softball fields will be replaced by a full-sized soccer field that is easily adaptable to lacrosse, field hockey, football and other sports.
To ensure there is ample parking for the YMCA and the fields, the number of spaces will be increased from 126 to 344, resulting in the loss of green space.
A bridge over the nearby railroad tracks will be built, fulfilling a longtime city desire to better connect the two sides of the park. New pedestrian paths will ensure that people can more easily get from the fields and the YMCA to the high school.
“This ends up maximizing the potential use of the park for different purposes other than the YMCA,” said Mike Svetz, head of the city’s parks and recreation department.
City officials considered placing the athletics center on the softball space but realized it would restrict the size of the field. The YMCA backs the location away from the fields.
“We see some synergies in being over in the picnic area and preserving field space across the way,” said Kurt Krueger, head of the local YMCA.
The community has a greater need for rectangular field space that can be used for multiple sports than it has for softball fields, Svetz said. The city is spending $150,000 in the upcoming budget to light the girls softball field at CHS so that more games can be played there.
Area soccer teams will be one of the main beneficiaries of the redesigned park.
“This opens the door for large soccer competitions in the future,” Mike Farruggio, a member of the city’s Planning Commission, said Tuesday at an unveiling of the park plan at the city meeting space at the Market Street Garage.
The Dogwood Festival would have to move from space north of the softball fields to the expanded parking lot, Svetz said. It makes more sense for the rides to be on hard asphalt, he added.
But the president of the festival’s board of directors has reservations about the plan. Freida Loose-Wagner worries that there won’t be space for cars and the 14 rides.
“I don’t think we’d have enough room and I don’t know how we’d be able to put all the rides in there,” she said.
Krueger, the head of the YMCA, questions the expansion of the parking lot and planned adjustments to the road leading to the lot. It would eat up too much green space and be unnecessarily expensive, he believes.
“I think we have a more efficient way to do that parking that would save that road and be less costly,” he said.
Svetz would not disclose a cost estimate for the park’s overhaul or a timeline for construction, but said that both would be announced at the council meeting in two weeks.
The YMCA hopes to break ground next spring and open the center in spring or summer 2010. To date the organization has raised $7 million, of which $2 million came from Albemarle County. The city and county will each chip $1.25 million if the center includes at least six competitive swimming lanes and if the CHS swim team has priority to practice in the winter months.