Northern New York follies

Dome and domer

You’ve got to give Watertown Supervisor Joel Bartlett credit – he is perseverant. For the past eight years, he has doggedly pursued a convention center for the town, and has done so in the face of studies the town has commissioned that have predicted such a facility would be a losing proposition for the town.

It appeared as though the convention center idea was back in hibernation until last year, when a confluence of events gave Joel the chance to rouse his sleeping abomination – the growth of mercantilism along Route 3 west of the city and the decision to build a new county road linking routes 3 and 12F gave him just the opening he needed to revive the beast.

The newest plan, if you can call it that, involves construction of a monolithic dome somewhere along the new county route on land the town does not own. It would be joined by a smaller dome firehall. The larger dome would cost a minimum of $6 million, according to the supervisor. And though no estimate was given for the minidome, you pretty much need to assume it will be in the high hundred-thousands, or perhaps more.

The use of monolithic domes for public buildings is becoming more popular, without doubt. Across the country, they are being used for the expected uses – storage domes and maintenance buildings – and for less likely uses, such as schools. Their reinforced concrete shells are strong and durable, withstanding hurricanes and tornadoes far better than other neighboring structures. Properly outfitted and operated, they can be very energy efficient. And they may not be as ugly as you might at first blush expect.

Having said all that, let’s return to the basic premise: that the town of Watertown should be the developer and owner of a conference center. As the town’s consultant has more than once pointed out, the size of the greater Watertown metropolitan area doesn’t augur well for its ability to attract enough outside use of a conference-slash-convention center to make it pay for itself. It isn’t likely, for example, the National Association of Eyelet, Grommet and Snap Manufacturers (NAEGSM) will be flying into Watertown International to be greeted by warmly clad snowbunnies, presented with ice leis and whisked to the Ramada to party for a few hours before heading to the Bartlett Dome to discuss popular grommet diameters and innovations in snap lubrication.

The problem with all of this is that the enthusiasm for the project can be generated by something as simple as an innovative design – it’s a Monolithic Dome! – when what people should be looking at is a cost-benefit ratio. And, of course, there is the pesky question of whether a town should be the owner of a quasi-commercial enterprise. The town’s own consultants have persistently suggested that it would take extraordinary luck for the town to simply break even, and that would include finding as many other uses for the facility as is possible. To that end, Joel is trying to lasso in everyone from Jefferson Community College to the Department of Homeland Security (honest – I’m not making this up). The only thing this plan is lacking so far is Kevin Fear and Billy Fucillo.

And whether the town should be venturing into this uneasy public-private area is a serious question that residents of the municipality should be weighing in on. Even if the proposed center were to break even, its operation would entail a whole new headache for town government, including new employees, more bookkeeping and the challenging task of juggling public and private money. There are agencies set up for this – Jefferson County Industrial Development Agency and the Development Authority of the North Country both have experience with both large sums of money and public/private connections – that would be far better positioned to deal with this than is the town of Watertown.

As for the proposal for a minidome fire facility– I frankly am captivated by the idea of a dome firehall. A schematic of one on the Monolithic Dome Institute Web site shows potential for a utile and efficient building. But, and this is a big but, there are important questions about the Watertown Fire Department in general that should be brought out and answered before that department starts building storage sheds, let along million-dollar domes. The most pressing question for the fire department is the issue of how to best manage it’s bisected coverage area; no other department in the county, or the north country, has to roll trucks for three miles through someone else’s fire district to get from its fire barn to parts of its district. Yet Watertown frequently must send its trucks all the way through the city of Watertown to get to a fire site on the west side of town.

The argument that a new firedome on the west side of the town will solve that is shallow; there already is a fire facility on the west side, but one of its primary problems is getting volunteers TO it to roll its trucks. The inefficiency of the Watertown fire district needs to be seriously addressed before fire commissioners commit piles of tax money to a new facility. It’s time for the city and town to sit down and try to figure this out with serious talks, turf and pride issues set firmly aside.

The town won’t be able to push this Joel Dome past taxpayers without a vote. It shouldn’t get that far, however; if town residents with serious concerns about the plan speak up now, the political pressure could put this idea back to sleep. Which is where it should be.

posted by Kentsboss @ 12:20 PM