GRAND FORKS — City officials and members of the Grand Forks Park District are hoping another visit to the Fargo Parks Sports Center will give them more ideas about how the future Altru Sports Complex will operate once completed.
The group visited Fargo’s sports complex on Monday, Oct. 13, with attendees including Mayor Brandon Bochenski, City Administrator Todd Feland, Finance Director Maureen Storstad, Visit Grand Forks Executive Director Julie Rygg, representatives of the city Park District, and city architects.
Bochenski said the visit is meant to look at the current finances of the complex and see what its projected profits and losses are at this time, as well as to look at how tournaments are being brought to the facility.
“We’ve done this in the past; this will kind of be the second time,” he said. “It’s really a follow-up to the previous tour that we took.”
A group from Grand Forks toured the Fargo sports complex about a year ago, according to Bochenski. He said the sports complex there is similar in many ways to the one planned in Grand Forks, though the Altru Sports Complex will have a pool while the Fargo complex has hockey rinks.
“Outside of that, the turf is very similar; the pickleball area is similar; the courts are similar,” Bochenski said. “It’s really in the same region, so I think it’s a really great comparative.”
The visit will also give board members of the Grand Forks Park District the opportunity to see how the Fargo Park District operates and maintains a facility similar to the Altru Sports Complex. While the complex is city-owned, Grand Forks’ Park District will be managing the day-to-day operations.
George Hellyer, executive director of the Grand Forks Park District, said meeting with representatives of Fargo’s Park District will allow him and his colleagues to compare financial data and operating details like occupancy rates, how rentals for Fargo’s turf and courts are handled, what kind of software the Fargo complex uses and more.
The Park District has had some budgeting concerns related to the Altru Sports Complex, Hellyer confirmed. While the district has budgeted a projected net loss of $367,000 associated with costs from Phase 1 of the complex, it’s still working on forecasts for other costs and a potential operating budget, which is hard to estimate at this point.
“We do have some capacity to absorb some more losses, but depending on how big those losses are is where things start to maybe look more difficult,” Hellyer said. “We’re definitely excited about the space, definitely excited for the community about the opportunities, but don’t want it to hamper other operations of the Park District as well.”
Hellyer also said that while the two facilities have some similarities, the Fargo Parks Sports Center isn’t a complete one-to-one for the Altru Sports Complex, especially in terms of the number of courts and the respective size of both facilities.
“I don’t think it will answer all our questions, but it’ll help us either understand that, yeah, we’re heading on the right path with some of the estimates we’re doing, or maybe we need to dig a little deeper with some other stuff, too,” he said.