Not on track

Not on track Mayor shares disappointment with lack of financial assistance

HARTINGTON — After years of research and several meetings with stakeholders, the Hartington City Council accepted a bid Monday to repair the track at the Hartington Community Complex.

The Council accepted a bid of $152,625 from Fisher Tracks of Boone, Iowa.

Councilman Roman Sudbeck said that bid pays to tear the old rubber off the track and then repair the cracks and smooth out any low spots in the asphalt below it. New rubber will then be laid down and the track will then be painted. The work will begin this fall, but Sudbeck said the company guarantees the track season will not be affected.

The work comes with a five-year guarantee. Sudbeck said he is hoping to squeeze a few more years out of it, though. Norfolk Catholic did the same thing at their track and they are now on year six, he said.

The Community Complex track was originally built in 2004 and carried a 15 to 20-year lifespan. It has now been in use for 22 years and is in need of an update.

The city has been looking at options as how to pay for that update for quite some time, now.

The process has been frustrating, said Mayor Mark Becker. 'We've been trying to figure out a way to refurbish the track, so it's good for all the schools to use,' he said during Monda y's City Council meeting.

Becker said the city looked at bids ranging from over $1 million to $150,000. The lifespan connected to those bids was anywhere from 35 years down to five years.

In an effort to provide local schools with one of the best and most affordable tracks, the city council held meetings last winter with officials from both Cedar Catholic and Hartington- Newcastle, seeking to get an inter-local agreement put in place.

Becker said such an agreement 'would help support the town.'

'We asked if they (Hartington-Newcastle Public School) wanted to buy the track — everything was on the table — to lease, to buy any kind of option other than what we had currently, and they refused to change anything and accept any kind of responsibility for it,' he said. 'Right now the city of Hartington has got the sole responsibility of taking care of the track and the football field and the maintenance and everything. We were hoping they would take some piece of that to at least work with us to do some of the repairs, we would take car e of the maintenance of it, but they refused to do that.'

Becker said it is rare that a city, and not the school, owns and operates the community sports complex. If the school did own the track, they would have a much larger tax base to draw funds from to make improvements to the facility, he said.

'The valuation for the school district is $1.5 billion, which is about 13 times the valuation of the city of Hartington. Right now, the valuation for the city of Hartington is about $120 mil lion,' he said. 'But the Hartington-Newcastle School Board has decided not to participate in anything with the track, so that is why we are at where we're at right now. The city of Hartington and all the citizens of Hartington will pay for refurbishment of the track — 100 percent of the cost — and the school district will pay nothing.'

The city does recieve some funding in the form of annual rent from HNS and Cedar Catholic. Both schools are charged $8,000 per year to rent the facilities for football and track. Becker has said that total barely pays for the mowing at the facility each year.