RSFA Staff Gives Update on Campus Refurbishment Project

By Phil Trubey

December 4, 2022

Casual Dining Annex concept December 2022

At the December RSFA Board meeting, Assistant General Manager Dominique Albrecht gave an update on the Board’s number one priority, the Recreational Campus Refurbishment project.

This project aims to enhance member amenities while also providing much needed maintenance on ageing facilities (like the woeful parking lot).

This entire project will occur over many years and over many Boards. The presented very preliminary overall timeline shows work continuing over various phases over the next six years.

No Board action was taken in this meeting, it was informational only. The package presented will be shown to Golf and Tennis Boards for their feedback during December and a budget request for the initial design phase will likely be requested in the January Board meeting.

While some preliminary design concepts have already been done, and these were shown at the presentation, these are not anywhere near final and should be considered as conversation starters. The actual design contract will be kicked off in January, should it get Board approval, and the design work is estimated to take around six months after much additional feedback is gathered.

The point of showing anything at this stage was to educate all stakeholders about the proposed project scope and to show something concrete to tease out useful feedback.

Casual Dining Annex

Many nearby communities have two restaurants to serve their members. Santaluz has four dining optionsThe Bridges, threeThe Crosby has a formal and a separate casual dining option.

You get the idea. Our 2,000 homesites can support more than just a single restaurant with a snackbar. One of the problems with our current set up is that our one restaurant serves too many different types of customers making the restaurant neither fish nor fowl.

So, we will be killing two birds with one stone here. We will have two separately branded dining facilities, one casual dining, and one more formal. They each will have solid kitchens and give the community another amenity.

(Shhh: Can you keep a secret? I wasn’t supposed to point this out, but did you notice that the restaurant now has brand new menus with new items? Lunch menu here, and dinner menu here).

You can download the slides about this project presented at the December Board meeting here. Page three shows the concept for the casual dining annex (they are still calling it a “snack bar” but it is way evolved past that in this concept). The brown shaded area would be indoors, with disappearing doors to allow an indoor/outdoor ambiance. It would be surrounded by outdoor dining.

It can’t be emphasized enough that the final product will look quite different after it goes through feedback and a full design process. Nonetheless, this gives something concrete to give feedback on.

And yes, of course, once the design is finalized, it would go through Art Jury and County permitting processes.

Clubhouse Restaurant

The clubhouse restaurant would also get a redesign, which would be more of an interior remodel plus expanded patio space. While the “snack bar” would be demolished and rebuilt, no building envelope changes are currently contemplated for the clubhouse restaurant.

The kitchen and office spaces are deemed to be in good shape, so no updates are contemplated there. There isn’t much to show about the clubhouse restaurant since design work is so preliminary. The current idea is to expand bar seating, making portions of the restaurant an indoor/outdoor space and expand patio seating.

Wellness Facility

There has been some preliminary discussion about a wellness facility. This would house areas for sports therapy, massages, and injury maintenance and fitness classes as well as possible areas for weight room and aerobics equipment (no swimming pool is contemplated). The idea is that such a facility would be made available somehow to all Association members and certainly golf and tennis club members could use it for specialized strength and fitness training.

This facility, if it ever gets built, is further down the timeline and as such there isn’t much to look at other than possible locations.

Parking Lot

Design work on the parking lot hasn’t started yet, but staff are well aware of the parking lot deficiencies that include old staircases and handrails, uneven surfaces, deferred paint maintenance, and inadequate lighting. Expanding the number of parking spaces is also being looked at.

Timelines and Budgets

The document referenced above shows proposed timelines and budgetary numbers. As you may remember, about 18% of our yearly assessments ($0.025 out of $0.14 per $100 property value) are being used to pay down the RSF Connect construction loan. This will be paid off in the next few years and that will free up another pot of money to allocate to another project, like this Campus Refurbishment project.

Summary

This is an ambitious project, one that got started several years ago, got sidelined due to Covid, and has now been resurrected under the new Board. It will take skill and plenty of work over many years to see this project through to a successful conclusion. But it is something we must do in some form or another. Our restaurant was last updated fifteen years ago. The snack bar is ancient. The parking lot was never built properly in the first place (it is a civil engineering disaster every time it rains). Facilities always need periodic attention and the time is now to tackle this one.

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