Program Guide Winter/Spring 2024

Funding Coalescing Like any ambitious project, WCNCC needs resources and cooperation to make it happen. Federal pandemic aid funds and 2016 voter-approved bonds totaling $10 million funded the design portion of the project. In 2022, City residents approved another $50 million in bonds for the construction, which will be combined with a $15 million contribution from Guilford County, approved this year. More funding came on board in fall 2023. A $4.3-million federal Outdoor Recreation Legacy Program Grant will support the development of the park. The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro’s Public Art Endowment has also agreed to provide $75,000 to commission art for the space. Project Timeline Even with funds secured, due to its size and complexity, the project is a few years away from welcoming its first visitors. Tillery expects the design documents to be ready by the end of this year. Demolition of the Windsor Recreation Center should begin toward the end of 2024. Due to the building’s size, the project will have to be permitted by the state, adding extra steps to the construction project. The improvements to the park will begin first, Tillery said. “We’re moving ahead as quickly as possible,” Tillery says. Estimated Design & Construction Schedule • Design Development Finalized – December 2023 • Construction Documents and Permitting Development Phase – January 2024 to November 2024 • Prepare Trade Packages for Bidding, Utilization Plan, and Pre-Qualification Process – May 2024 to November 2024 • Potential Early Demo Pack – Early Fall 2024 • Bid and Contract Approval – December 2024 to February 2025 • Construction Period – February 2025 to March 2027

Not only do we want to be innovative, but we want WCNCC to be a destination that withstands the test of time,” McCray says The planned four-story, 63,000-foot building will be a space with open and enclosed rooms for events, meetings, and programs. There will be a dance studio, weight room, locker rooms, and gym with walking track. The all-important indoor aquatics facility will be wrapped in glass so it can be seen from inside and outside the building. There will be a teaching kitchen, a makerspace, an audiovisual lab, gaming spaces, and a first-in-Greensboro sensory space. In addition to library stacks, there will be library lending kiosks – kind of like a book vending machine – that will house collections carefully curated to enhance the programming, such as health and wellness literature. It will be more than twice the size of the existing Windsor Recreation Center and Vance Chavis Library Branch buildings. It will be in a modern architecture style with high-quality design, Vines says. “The level of architecture and design is important. Sometimes you, quite frankly, only see that or experience that in a private-sector facility,” he says. “It looks like something that is going to be a spaceship,” Watson said of the innovative design. “When you see that picture you say, ‘Golly how are they going to build this?’ That is what is so exciting. It’s so different.” "The outdoor park will be as impressive, with an amphitheater, seating, and spaces for a wide range of activities and programs. There will be space for those family reunions and cookouts the residents wanted as well as the kind of green space librarians love to program," Blanton says. “The most exciting thing about the building is not the building,” Harris says. “It’s the landscape and the fact that it is all one experience…We think it is going to be pretty incredible.”

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