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RTC finds a new potential developer [UPDATED]
Published 11:19am Tuesday, April 19, 2011 Updated 3:25pm Tuesday, April 19, 2011The Regional Treatment Center property has a new potential suitor: Global Athlete Village, a Minnesota-based non-profit group dedicated to encouraging humanitarian and community service efforts by young athletes.
City Administrator Mark Sievert announced at Monday’s city council meeting the organization’s interest in operating a facility on the RTC’s campus. Representatives from GAV have toured the RTC facility and twice met privately with city representatives, including a meeting on Sunday. The delegation of city staff and council members was kept small to avoid violating the open meeting law.
“It’s a lead,” Sievert told the city council. “Things were positive.”
He added that the city is also in touch with other potential developers of the property.
“We do have a couple of others who we hope to have visiting here in the next couple of weeks,” he said.
“We’ve been working many years on a (center) that would mobilize young adults and student athletes to … do service, learn about humanitarian projects, get some basic training about those projects and then send them out,” said GAV’s founding president and CEO Stephanie Smith. GAV feels that the Kirkbride building has the possibility to house that center.
GAV, which is partnered with Rotary International, has sent out teams to do humanitarian work throughout the United States and in other countries around the world. It primarily is focused on utilizing youth, high school and college sports teams, explained Smith, because those groups already have built-in support and communications systems.
“Global Athlete Village can serve as a bridge to connect the dots” between service needs and a ready-made service group of athletes, she said.
This year, GAV mobilized track and tennis players from Apple Valley High School to help with flood relief and sandbagging in Fargo, N.D. In 2010, the group sent 25 youth hockey players to Vancouver, Canada during the Winter Olympics, where the athletes played hockey against local teams at night and did service projects by day. In 2001, working with the student athlete model before officially founding GAV, Smith and others organized a group of student athletes from various teams in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area to go to New York City and help with disaster relief after Sept. 11.
Smith said that if GAV decides to move forward at the Kirkbride building, it would do so in conjunction with other humanitarian groups that could train the athletes who would come into the program.
“We would be looking for other non-profits to come in while we would serve as a master developer,” she said.
In this way, she added, the Kirkbride could become a multi-use building, with space for housing, offices and special programs.
While Smith stopped short of saying that GAV would use the entirety of the Kirkbride, she did say that it was the group’s goal to create a center or centers in a historical building, not to tear down and start from scratch. She also said she was open to other organizations sharing the building with GAV.
She added that if GAV was to use the Kirkbride building, it would be a permanent commitment.
“You don’t spend that kind of money to rehab a historic building and walk away,” she said.
Global Athlete Village can be found online.
Tags: city council, Global Athlete Village, Regional Treatment Center
Good lord, not this again….haven’t any of the council members ever seen The Music Man before? Global Athlete Village, formerly Northern Lights Athlete Village. A non-profit, faith based initiative with no money, no exposure and a website that looks like it was built by a junior high school kid. Stephanie Smith has eyes bigger than her stomach as she is also behind the grand idea of using the old Fort Snelling site in the twin cities as an Indian peace park. Who will cough up the 175+++ million to get it off the ground is another story altogether.
I cannot imagine that an organization such as the GAV would need anything more than an 800 square foot rented space in a strip mall. Not the entire Kirkbride building.
The city council members need to weed out the crackpots and find a group with the capital, means and connections to actually do something viable with the RTC campus. Otherwise, anyone else is just wasting valuable time.