.jpg)
Lexington City Council unanimously endorsed a proposal by the Rockbridge Area Recreation Organization for a timber-frame pavilion at Brewbaker Park at its meeting on Feb. 2.
The pavilion will be the latest entry in an annual project that is headed by retired Virginia Military Institute civil engineering professor W. Grigg Mullen. Similar structures have been built every spring since 1997, including three in Rockbridge County: one in Goshen Pass, one on the outdoor rifle range at VMI and one next to the football stadium at Rockbridge County High School. The Brewbaker project was originally slated for spring of 2024, but when this year’s project fell through, it was bumped up.
RARO Executive Director Chad Coffey noted that many parks have some sort of shelter or pavilion and that “in a lot of parks, it’s the heart of the park.”
The proposed structure will have a concrete base, taking up an area of a little over 900 square feet between the football and baseball fields. It will have electricity and some picnic tables and will ideally have a variety of uses, from being a place for RARO and other organizations to potentially hold meetings during warm weather months to being a place parents can use while waiting to pick their kids up from practices to general community use within the park.
“This, to me, is not just a RARO project,” Coffey said. “It’s a community project, because the number of people I see using the area, the park, it’s consistent and it’s quite impressive. Not to mention, when you factor in all of RARO’s usage of the fields, I think it’s certainly [a worthy project].”
The cost for the entire project is just over $18,500, not including any cost of food for feeding the cadets constructing the shelter. RARO has applied for a $20,000 grant from the Community Health Foundation to cover the cost, but won’t know if it will receive the grant until mid-March.
RARO’s board has approved $11,625 to help cover the cost of paying the instructors and the materials for the timber structure as well as part of the cost of food should the grant not come through. The remaining expense, to cover the material and labor for the concrete slab for the shelter (a total of $9,757.48), would be put up by the city. Those funds will be appropriated by a budget amendment at a future meeting if and when they are needed.
The pavilion will be built over a four-day period around the first weekend in April.
