MARYSVILLE City officials are working to acquire Rudy Wright Memorial Field and the rest of the 10th Street School campus on Cedar Avenue in downtown Marysville.
When a new combined options campus opens next fall the Marysville School District plans to abandon the 10th Street campus, although that band-oriented school will keep its name when it moves to new quarters next to Quil Ceda Elementary School on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. Currently the 2-and-a-half-acre campus holds a half-dozen portables next to a 20,000-square-foot gymnasium that was the former home of the YMCA. The district is holding the site while Marysville officials scramble to come up with money to pay for it.
According to Mayor Dennis Kendall, the gym will be flopped to a non-profit agency and the city will keep the ball field.
The field itself we will maintain as a city park, Kendall said. Its just something that Ive always talked about putting some kind of facility at some place in town.
The city is also pursuing a 25-acre site near the Smokey Point neighborhood that would provide space for many more baseball fields, in addition to some trails. That land came back to a bank more than a year ago and the city has been working to swing that deal ever since. The bank is holding the land and the city is holding its breath.
We are still interested in it if we can work it out, Kendall said.
Currently the only baseball field the city owns is the one at Jennings Memorial Park on Armar Road.
Thank god for the school district, Kendall said.
The city pays the Marysville School District to share the maintenance costs and to use the athletic fields for city sports programs. Administrators have long said the parks department has been neglected as officials have had to plow tight revenues into roads.
The school districts capital projects director said legally the site can be held for another public agency in accordance with inter-local agreements and most likely it wont be put out to others for bids. The city might be first in line, according to John Bingham, but will have to pay full price, which could be as high as $2 million. That would not include the portables, which the district would take when vacating the land, he added. The land and buildings are currently being assessed.
The district is holding off on making any decisions for the site for about a month, as the agenda is full for the next few weeks and Marysville officials are working to secure funding for any purchase, Bingham said.