The City of Colorado Springs is looking to dissolve the Westside Community Center Working Committee, which has worked with the City to lead the community space since 2021. In 2020, Woodmen Valley Chapel’s Center for Strategic Ministry, the former operator since 2010, told the city they would not be renewing their contract past 2021. In response, Westside community members banded together to save the space. Since then the working committee, composed of 10 volunteers, has worked to secure tenants and programming for the campus, generating revenue and maintaining a robust community hub that serves the neighborhood.
Mark Snow, the community recreation manager for the City of Colorado Springs Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services, said the success of the Westside Community Center Working Committee is why it should be dissolved. “They’ve basically worked themselves out of a job,” he told the Parks Advisory Board during their Oct. 9 meeting.
“We believe that the [working committee] has fulfilled its mission of representing the voice of the Westside community in the recommendation of programs and services at the Center, with over 90% of the available leased space occupied (soon to be 100%) and 60+ hours of programming happening per week,” Snow wrote in an Oct. 6 email to the Working Committee. “However, the community will still have a voice in recommendations for the Center (as they do at all other centers), including directly with staff, with Parks Leadership, at the Parks Advisory Board (or connecting with PAB members), or even at City Council.”
In addition to the success of leasing and programming, Snow pointed to staff hours needed to support Working Committee meetings, difficulty recruiting new members, and a decrease in attendance by the public at Working Committee meetings. He suggested the Working Committee transition to a “friends group,” a nonprofit like Friends of Red Rock Canyon, which coordinates projects and fundraising activities to support the areas they represent.
“I think there’s some consensus on the Working Committee that something like a friends model might be the correct evolution,” said Justin Trudeau, president of the Westside Community Center Working Committee. “Our concern is just that we don’t have a friends group in place. We don’t have an agreement, a memorandum of understanding with the city, based on a friends’ group. While we think that’s probably a good evolution, because of all the reasons that we’ve heard cited … we’re not necessarily opposed to it. It’s just that moving to do this — and the big thing is that this came as a surprise. We got a letter on Monday that said, ‘We’re going to make this presentation. We’re going to make this recommendation.’ And nobody was consulted. The Working Committee wasn’t consulted. Users at the center weren’t consulted and, to my knowledge, nobody else in the community was consulted. It was Parks who decided that they saw an end to this project and didn’t consult with the biggest partner on the project, which is the community.”
Joyce Salazar, the executive director of RISE Southeast, a nonprofit aimed to enhance southeast Colorado Springs from within through resident-led change, raised concerns about Meadows Park Community Center, which is set to close this week due to the city’s $31 million budget shortfall. Salazar noted that Meadows Park didn’t have any kind of working committee to advocate for the center or the residents.
“My personal fear is that without that community engagement and the volunteer engagement, that it sets up a spiral of decreasing activation and then when times get tough again, or continue to be tough, they can say look at the center that’s not very activated [and say], ‘Why don’t we just turn it all into leasable space?’”
The Parks Advisory Board will vote on the dissolution of the Westside Community Center Working Committee during their Nov. 13 meeting at 1401 Recreation Way at 7:30 a.m. The next Westside Community Center Working Committee meeting is Oct. 16 at 1628 W. Bijou St. 2 p.m.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect Salazar’s new role and RISE’s nonprofit status.
