Mattituck Park District will be demolishing the lifeguard shed at Veterans Memorial Park and hopes to construct a new pavilion in its place by the fall this year.
Kevin Byrne, the park district chair, said they elected to remove the building because it’s “essentially an eyesore.
“The existing structure has long outlived its usefulness,” Mr. Byrne said. “It has decay, it has no functioning utilities, it has a lot of rot and it’s just not a salvageable building.”
The park district is accepting bids for the demolition. Sealed bids will be received by the district clerk at Veterans Memorial Park (11280 Peconic Bay Blvd.) in Mattituck. The deadline for bids closes April 24. At press time, Mr. Byrne said nine bids had been submitted.
The first phase of the plan is to demolish the building. The second phase would be to erect a pavilion in its stead and the third part of the plan is to put solar panels on the new pavilion, “which will generate enough electricity to totally power the park without using any energy from the grid,” Mr. Byrne said.
“We’re getting a lot of interest from a lot of local contractors, which is what we want,” Mr. Byrne said. “We prefer, whenever we can, to give our business and revenues to local merchants and businesses.”
The project is estimated to cost around $120,000 and the park district hopes to have it completed by the fall, Mr. Byrne said. They have allocated the money for the project from their general funds.
“We had very significant budget problems several years ago, which we rectified with a very significant tax increase,” Mr. Byrne said. “Since then we’ve been able to balance our budget, balance our books and start to reinvest in the facilities and not just general repairs and maintenance, but actual upgrades and modernizations and planning for the future of the property.”
The park district looked into “several alternatives and options for trying to salvage the building,” Mr. Byrne said, noting that at one point a long time ago, the structure was “sort of a concession building.”
”We looked at trying to renovate it and try and do something similar to that, but the cost to renovate it versus the revenues and other things that it might generate were way, way out of proportion,” Mr. Byrne said. “There was no business model that we could come up with, for a concessionaire to go in there and use the building, unless we put really more than hundreds of thousands of dollars into the building. The structure was basically useless at this point.”
Mr. Byrne said the community feedback on the decision has been “very positive,” though “admittedly there’s a lot of nostalgia surrounding that building and it would have been nice if we could have preserved it, repaired it or done something with it.”
The Mattituck Park District will be announcing progress on the project at every meeting, which happen on the first and third Thursday of every month at Veterans Memorial Park. They will also include status updates on the project in their quarterly distributed newsletter, and make announcements during their popular summer concert and movie series this summer.