North Wales Council Looking Ahead to Operations of Arts Center

Dan Sokil | The Reporter•

An illuminated message sign stands in front of the borough-owned former church at 125 N. Main Street in North Wales on June 28, 2023.

As talks start on the 2024 budget for North Wales, council is also looking ahead on the future of a key project.

Council President Sal Amato gave an update last Tuesday night on the former church and arts building in the process of being renovated as the "North Wales Arts and Cultural Center.”

"When that comes into play, we’re going to need something to oversee that facility, as to what it’s doing, and who’s going to do it — some sort of management structure around it,” he said.

"We really have no idea what that looks like,” Amato said.

The former church and adjacent office building at 125 N. Main Street have been a public topic since late 2016, when council bought both as the church faced declining membership and growing maintenance costs. Since then, the office space has been rented for art classes and use by local nonprofits, and the church area hosted several public concerts after the St. Luke’s United Church of Christ congregation held their final services there in April 2022.

That month, council began talks on a project to renovate and update both buildings, including upgraded HVAC systems, widened doors, natural gas heat instead of oil, and conversion into flexible space for shared use by local nonprofits or agencies, creating spaces to provide services in a local setting during emergencies like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two grants were secured in July and October 2022 respectively, that September the town hired outside consultant CM3 Building Solutions as an energy services company to oversee and detail the energy efficiency portions of the project, and in June 2023 council awarded a $2.7 million contract for CM3 to oversee the renovations and energy upgrades for a project expected to run through 2024.

August brought a vote to grant roughly $33,000 in waivers for permit costs related to the project, and in September borough Manager Christine Hart said preconstruction meetings had been held with the contractors, and materials ordered ahead of the start of work.

Last Tuesday night, the update came from the council president, noting that council would need to put in place a structure to oversee aspects of the future center, beyond just who would use the nonprofit office space.

"The other objective, of course, is to plan and provide activities that support a community focus for family-friendly cultural activities,” he said.

He, borough Manager Christine Hart, assistant manager Alex Turock, and council’s finance committee have recently met to discuss next steps, and who will be charged with identifying those next steps.

"What we decided to do was to set up a small team to start looking at what’s required to manage this: to actually find out what we need in terms of people, what would be the way they would operate, how they would interact with council and administration, a variety of things,” Amato said. "We really don’t even know enough questions to ask.”

In the near term, that effort will be headed up by Turock with the aid of councilwomen Wendy McClure and Brittany Kohler, both of whom volunteered to serve on that group, he said. The group has no set timeline for now, Amato added, but he hopes to hear from them soon.

"Come back to us at some point, and let us know when you can get something like that done. There’s no urgency, in the next couple of weeks, but we certainly need to start thinking about what that group looks like,” he said.

McClure added that she’s already looking forward to that task.

"We do have tons of ideas, and I am so excited about it. The events that we’re going to be able to bring to our community, and our extended community, are really far out,” she said.

Early projections from the contractor overseeing the project have said that renovations could be done by early summer 2024, and Amato said he hopes the behind-the-scenes work has enough of a structure in place for performances to start around then.

"When the project is done, we want to get off to a flying start. A lot of this has to be in place prior to that,” he said.

McClure added after the meeting that anyone interested in helping can contact Turock to start, and she’s looking forward to getting on the schedule of artists the town could approach to perform there.

"Time is of the essence. To book any kind of performer, we need to get our act together, and use the people that we know have walked this walk before, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” she said.

North Wales borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on Nov. 14 at the borough municipal building, 300 School Street. For more information visit www.NorthWalesBorough.org.

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