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New rec building opens at Cumming City Park
Park
Rick Rennick sits at his easel Tuesday in the new community building at Cumming City Park. Rennick, who has been teaching art for the parks and recreation department for more than 25 years, said the facility offers much better lighting. - photo by Micah Green

CUMMING — Residents have wasted little time putting to use the new community building at Cumming City Park, which opened this week.

Greg Little, director of the city’s parks and recreation department, said classes began Monday. 

“We moved programs in and started those,” Little said. “We’re in the process of moving the offices over now. You run into issues with coordinating computer changeovers, phone changeovers and that kind of stuff, so we’re on kind of a skeleton crew with offices right now.”

According to Little, some work on the 27,000-square-foot building off Pilgrim Mill Road has not been completed due to weather.

“We’re into the programming and office part, but we are still working on what will eventually be the conference rooms and the other programming rooms,” he said. “Those will probably be another month and a half before we get into those.”

The estimated cost of the building is $2.65 million. In January 2015, the council approved changes to the proposal which reduced the costs from $3.24 million.

The improvements to the park, which has been closed since January 2014, are being funded through an agreement with Forsyth County.

Through that arrangement, the city agreed to give the county $5.3 million it was entitled to from 1-cent sales tax revenue for two new parking decks that were built as part of the new county courthouse and jail projects. In exchange, the county agreed to give the city $4 million for the park.

More classes and offerings are soon expected to join the transition to the new facility.

“Our art classes, our dance and drama classes and our fitness classes, our aerobics boot camps, all of those have been moved from our former building to our new location,” Little said. 

“Eventually, this will be our location for our summer camps, our day camps and special needs camps and those sorts of those things.”

He added that once work is completed, the city will continue with other parts of the project.

“When we get some [good] weather, we will finally complete the landscaping around the building and go on to the other phases of the project, which will eventually include a playground and a pavilion and those sort of things,” he said.

The former recreation building across the way is expected to get a new life as a center for adults with disabilities, but Little said he did not have a timeline for when that might occur.