Concept design for community center unveiled
Published 8:00 am Tuesday, December 19, 2006
The Kingston Community Center Foundation has completed a concept design for the Kingston Community Center’s future home at the Village Green Park.
Planning for this project started in 2002 with a survey of Kingston’s 98346 Zip code households. In it, area residents defined the needs that a new community center should satisfy.
Over the last year the foundation has worked with the community to turn those ideas into an overall design that was unveiled in November, thanks to the efforts of Miles Yanick & Company of Bainbridge Island. Kingston’s project will be unique among community center projects as it will integrate nearby senior housing into the center and the park.
Kitsap County Commissioner Chris Endresen’s persistent and successful leadership over 18 months in purchasing the Navy housing property on West Kingston Road provided a location for the community center, enabling the design process to go forward. This property, together with previous sewage treatment plant property and Kola Kole Park, will form Kingston’s Village Green Park. The park will include the skateboard park on Lindvog Avenue and extend to the Kingston tennis courts; it will also extend from West Kingston Road back to the California Avenue right-of-way that runs behind the commercial buildings on Highway 104 and include Kola Kole Park.
The new community center and senior housing buildings will be located behind where the Navy housing is now and the existing Navy housing will be removed. In the interim, the Kitsap County Consolidated Housing Authority will manage the rental of the Navy duplex units. The community center building will house a 6,000 square-foot library, a senior center, meeting rooms, a kitchen/dining area, gymnasium, and space for the Kingston Boys and Girls Club. In the lobby, there will be space for displaying historic items of the Kingston area’s tribal and more recent history.
Senior housing will be contained a three-story building designed to blend in with the community center and park environment. Including the Kitsap Housing Authority in building the senior housing project would bring both financial and management resources to the community center project, and offer an exciting new concept of engaging Kingston’s seniors with a multigenerational community.
To minimize the footprint of development on the parkland, both buildings will have parking areas underneath them. Access to the buildings will be from two points on West Kingston Road. A natural buffer will remain between the project and the adjacent neighborhoods off of 1st Avenue. A small site further back in the park was identified for possible future county offices, such as the Kingston sheriff’s office. This site and the current sewage pumping station in the Village Green will be reached from California Avenue.
The next steps for this project will be to prepare a final design for the remainder of the parkland and then raise the money that will be needed for the final design and construction of the building projects.
For more information, attend the Kingston Community Center Foundation meetings at 10 a.m. on the third Tuesday of the month. The next meeting is Jan. 16 at the American Marine Bank, or drop by the foundation’s table at the Kingston Open House coming up in February.
