With the Logan Community Recreation Center closing next year, many local communities have banded together to look toward the possibility of building a countywide recreation center. However, the effort has yet to find support from the Cache County Council.
North Logan Mayor Lyndsay Peterson is one of the community leaders taking charge of the initiative. Peterson said that she believes creating a countywide recreation center will be much more beneficial to everyone involved. She has gathered letters of support for the cause from nine other municipalities in the valley.
“Historically, we haven’t done a great job of collaborating on valley-wide issues,” Peterson said. “To prove that, you can look no further than our split school districts, libraries and garbage. And I think what we’ve seen is it creates inefficiencies in each of those areas.”
Peterson said that creating a joint county recreation center would allow the facility to serve everyone’s needs, have better facilities, and be more cost effective than each city building its own.
One driving force of the possible new recreation center is the imminent closure of the Logan Community Recreation Center in 2025. On June 30, 2025, the nearly 50-year joint agreement between Logan City School District and the City of Logan will end, and the facility will only be utilized by the LCSD, ending public use.
According to Peterson, the initiative to look at building a recreation center came from a citizen group and the urging of residents from multiple communities, including Logan, North Logan and Nibley.
“At the urging of a citizen group, they brought us all into a room and we quickly realized that we could do a much better job on this project if we collaborated across the valley,” Peterson said. “We then concluded that it would be necessary to do a feasibility study that really outlines the parameters of a recreation center, or multiple recreation centers, so that we can present it to the voters and they can decide whether or not it’s something that we want to take on.”
The feasibility study mentioned was presented to the Cache County Council at the May 14 council meeting as a possible project to fund with Recreation, Arts, Parks, and Zoos (RAPZ) funds. However, some council members were opposed to the idea of using RAPZ funds for feasibility studies.
At the meeting, council member Nolan Gunnel said he would rather fund “shovel ready” projects than studies, including the $200,000 that was set to go to the new recreation center feasibility study.
Peterson disagreed, saying that this is exactly the type of thing the RAPZ Tax should fund. In addition to hitting the recreation section of RAPZ, a new center would also help bring in tourism, another goal of the RAPZ fund.
“I think that this is the exact type of thing that RAPZ tax was meant to facilitate,” Peterson said. “It it’s bringing in tourism. If we host tournaments here, we’re going to have people staying in our hotels, eating at our restaurants. It serves literally every person in the valley.”
Peterson added that if funds only ever go to “shovel in the ground” projects, many projects like this will never have a chance to happen.
According to Peterson, a feasibility study is necessary to make sure a recreation center could be built in the most efficient way possible. The study would give insight into the best place to put a center, the best management model, what facilities are most desired in the valley, the best cost structure, how much it will cost to build, and more.
Even if it is funded, the study would take some time. Peterson said that the very earliest that Cache County voters might see a bond for a new recreation center on their ballots is fall of 2025.
The council will vote whether to allocate the RAPZ funds at the next council meeting on May 28. Peterson said that without county support, it is nearly impossible for the individual communities to even see if a county wide recreation center is viable. She urges citizens to reach out to the council with their opinions.
“Just reaching out to the county council,” Peterson said. “I was surprised to hear that they weren’t aware of this groundswell of support for an indoor aquatic center in particular.”
On the other side, Council Chair David Erickson said at the May 14 council meeting that he does not believe everyone in the valley should be responsible for paying for recreation.
“To me, recreation is still a choice,” Erickson said. “People should be able to choose rather they go to a facility and patronize that facility or not. If we build a facility and everyone has to pay for it, we’ve taken that choice right away from them.”
Peterson said that if the recreation center is not something that Cache Valley residents want, she will not push for it to be built. However, with as much support as she has seen, she believes it is the county’s due diligence to get to a point where the recreation center can be place on the ballot for Cache Valley voters to decide.
“We really need the county to take the lead in this,” Peterson said. “That is the only method by which we could have a collaborative result here, and they haven’t been willing to drive this.”
