Roller skating rink or police department headquarters?

The debate rages on in Jim Thorpe Borough where a group of residents favor the return of a once-popular indoor skating rink on the lower level of Memorial Hall, while borough officials fear the municipality stands to lose millions in federal grant money if it doesn’t follow through with plans to renovate the space and move its police department there.

Currently, borough office staff and the Jim Thorpe Police Department share a 3,332-square-foot building built in 2008 adjacent to Memorial Hall, a large, two-story borough-owned community center off East Tenth Street.

After a 2016 feasibility study cited concerns over safety and available space given the building’s current layout, the borough has been looking to relocate office staff and police.

One of the study’s recommendations was that the borough renovate Memorial Hall, use one-third of the top floor for office staff while keeping the rest of the space as a community center, and move its police department to the bottom floor, where the roller skating rink was once located.

“The current borough office and police department were built in 2008, but to a point where we outgrew it before we even moved in,” council President Greg Strubinger said. “Memorial Hall is a building already owned by the borough. It is structurally sound, but some of the other items have deteriorated to the point where something needs to be done quickly. This project gives us a chance to make those improvements, relocate our office staff and police to a building that accommodates their needs and provides greater safety, and still use two-thirds of the top floor for things such as veterans events, use by nonprofit organizations, Boy Scouts, blood drives and all the things Memorial Hall was originally intended to be used for.”

Borough residents Amy and Ryan Kubishin started a petition last month to scrap the plan for the bottom floor of the hall and bring roller-skating back to the venue.

As of Monday morning, the petition had 921 signatures.

“We know it would take some renovations, volunteer work and a lot of helping hands to get it running again, but we would like a community meeting to see what we can do to help preserve the rink and open it back up to the families of Jim Thorpe,” Amy Kubishin said at January’s Jim Thorpe council meeting. “We agree where the police and borough administration are located now needs to be reconsidered, but we just want to facilitate that discussion.”

Current police station

Mayor Michael Sofranko said the way the current police station is set up is not in the best interest of the public and officers when it comes to safety.

“We have police officers eating at desks right now where they bring drugs in and sort them,” he said. “We don’t have the room to separate so you have officers putting fentanyl on one side of their desk and eating lunch on the other side. We were always able to compensate by moving to different desks, but protocols changed with COVID-19. The chief and I brought some of those concerns to the council’s police committee and how council wishes to address those concerns is up to them. I don’t come here with a hidden agenda of how or where this needs to be done.”

The borough has had trouble getting the project off the ground from a financial perspective, but finally feels it’s on the right track. A pre-COVID-19 estimate for the Memorial Hall project was $2.25 million, but that figure jumped to $3.72 million in May 2021.

Grants coming

After researching almost 30 different grants and programs to assist with funding without success, the borough wrote to U.S. Congressman Dan Meuser and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, hoping federal money could be included in a 2022 appropriations package.

“Repairs to the building (Memorial Hall) are needed to prevent deterioration,” the borough said in its letter. “Mold remediation may also be a factor. Relocating two borough departments will allow us to share in the costs of this building, allowing us to return the hall to a true community center for our seniors and children. Without these renovations, our only option could be to sell the facility, taking away a center that has become the heart of the community.”

The request seems to have paid off as while the final appropriations bill has yet to be passed, the borough is expecting $2.5 million in U.S. House of Representatives appropriations money through the help of Meuser and $1.465 million in U.S. Senate appropriations funds through the help of Casey.

“If you put those together, that right there just about takes care of the Memorial Hall project,” Strubinger said. “That is money we wouldn’t have been able to receive otherwise unless we were keeping this as a community resource. A police station is a community resource.”

Part of the renovations needed in the basement, according to borough officials, is HVAC work to eliminate sweating of the floors, which currently renders the space unusable.

Kubishin and others hope to continue the conversation about finding another location for the police department and returning the Memorial Hall basement to a skating rink.

“A lot of the activities for our children are outdoors and we do live in northeast Pennsylvania so we’re just looking at another option,” she said. “Everyone in Jim Thorpe has been at a birthday party down in the skating rink and we just want to give that back to our kids. I think if we hear from more of the public, get more ideas we could potentially form a new community of people who would step up and volunteer to help the skating rink and community center.”

Skating rink

Owen Jackson, an eighth-grade student who lives in the Penn Forest Streams development and attends the L.B. Morris School in Jim Thorpe, told council he also hopes to see the skating rink return.

“There aren’t a lot of places to go and have fun and could be a reason why youth get into legal trouble,” Jackson said. “I think adding a place like this skating rink would help drop the youth crime rate.”

Strubinger acknowledged the nostalgia surrounding the roller skating rink, but said the volunteerism that drove the facility to be successful decades ago is not the same today.

“There were several dozen volunteers who made up the Memorial Park Commission, and those community members devoted countless hours of their own personal time to build and run the facility,” Strubinger said. “Over time, the volunteerism deteriorated and around 15 years ago, it was left to the borough to take care of. Before, the park commission did all the fundraising and took care of everything, outside of the insurance. When no volunteers remained, it became a budgeted item for the borough to take care of the facility. We do have a budget and the government can only provide so much.”

The borough operated the top floor of Memorial Hall as a banquet and social hall facility under the management of Jim McHugh until 2017, when contract negotiations between the two stalled out.

A 2018 document drafted by Spillman Farmer Architects on behalf of the borough states that efforts to operate the facility as a community center and banquet facility resulted in an average of $75,000 of taxpayer funds per year used to supplement the facility.

“Through the decrease in volunteerism, the skating rink and this facility up here that was being run as a social hall started to run into a budget deficit that the taxpayers had to cover to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars,” Strubinger said. “We were left to make other decisions about how to best take care of the needs of the community. It will get all of our offices under one roof and still maintain a nice community center.”

Sofranko said no matter the outcome, the borough should be up front with residents about why it moves in the direction it does.

“The community has obviously expressed some concerns,” Sofranko said. “As the mayor, I do think it would be beneficial for council to put the facts out there in terms of what amount of money has been spent in Memorial Hall over the years, the amount of grant money that has come in, and other information that can clarify things that are out there on social media and in the community. A considerable amount of time has been spent on grant writing and things like that. I don’t think inviting the public in for an informational session like that is a bad thing.”

The effort to save the skating rink now has its own Facebook page, Save The Jim Thorpe Memorial Hall Roller Skating Rink.” Shirts to support the efforts are for sale online with all proceeds going to Amy Kubishin for “improvement and rejuvenation projects.”

Kubishin has asked others who support the return of the skating rink to write letters or emails to the borough requesting a public meeting.

“It is my hope,” she said, “that borough leadership will not move forward with their plans without providing this community with this opportunity.”