A new coalition that includes former mayors, philanthropists, athletes and civic volunteers is spearheading a $33-million campaign to revive a popular project: building Palo Alto's first city-owned gym.

The project has been on the city's radar since early 2022, when developer John Arrillaga proposed funding and building a new gym, a project that city officials had identified as a high priority when it comes to recreation needs. Arrillaga, who is known for constructing athletic facilities at Stanford University and in Menlo Park, was also planning to design, construct and spend about $30 million on the project.

But Arrillaga died shortly after making the proposal and Palo Alto's gym project has been in limbo since, with plenty of community support but no financial backing or real plans to advance it.

Now, things may be turning around. At a Jan. 17 community meeting, city staff and volunteers with the new group Friends of Palo Alto Recreation & Wellness Center offered some uplifting news for local gym advocates. The city and the Friends group have already identified two potential locations for a gym: Greer Park and Cubberley Community Center. The fundraising drive is now kicking off. And the city's negotiations with the Palo Alto Unified School District, which owns much of Cubberley, are now speeding up after years of disagreements about the center's redevelopment.

The demand for a new gym has not diminished since Arrillaga's offer, according Kristen O'Kane, director of the Community Services Department. By all accounts, Cubberley remains in shoddy shape. Some of its gym spaces have been unusable for more than year because of water damage caused by leaking pipes. And even if they were functional, that part of Cubberley is the property of the school district, which owns 27 acres of the 35-acre center on Middlefield Road.

"We do rent gyms from the school district at Cubberley but we do not own any," O'Kane said. "And the need for gym space is increasing for youth sports, for adults, seniors and therapeutic recreation, which produces programming for people with disabilities."

The new Friends group is hoping to expand gym capacity by following the model that has been used in other local projects that leaned heavily on private donations, including the recently renovated Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo and the soon-to-be-completed Palo Alto Museum on Homer Avenue.

Former mayors Bern Beecham, who worked on the Junior Museum and Zoo project and Tom DuBois, who strongly advocated for the history museum, are both members of the new Friends group. The team also includes former Mayor Judy Kleinberg as well as Parks and Recreation Commission members Anne Cribbs (a past Olympian), Jeff LaMere and Nellis Freeman. Other members include retired banker Roger Smith, former Deputy City Manager Steve Emslie, Tim Stitt, Yudy Deng, and Marc Guillett.

Cribbs said a key goal is to get a gym built sooner rather than later.

"We'd like to see shovels in the ground as soon as we raise the money to build the gym and get permits," Cribbs said. "We're not really excited to wait until 10 years from now for another master plan."

For that reason, Greer Park is now emerging as the top choice for some group members. Unlike Cubberley, which has been subject to numerous master plans and false starts over the past two decades, the park is owned by the city. It also has the benefits of being centrally located and of being large enough to accommodate a new gym.

According to O'Kane, the city has already analyzed four possible Greer Park locations for the new gym. Two are on the north side of the park, near the intersection of Amarillo Avenue and West Bayshore Road. Though they have the advantage of being close to utilities, they were removed from consideration because they are also near existing sports fields and would effectively result in one recreational facility replacing a portion of another.

Also discarded was a site on the south side of the park, near West Bayshore. Staff noted that this site is far from both utilities and the parking lot, which made it a weaker candidate.

The most suitable Greer Park location for a new gym, according to the city, is along the western edge of the park, near baseball fields and immediately adjacent to the parking lot, which would be expanded under this alternative. Known as Site C, this option is now the preferred option for some members of the fundraising group.

Beecham said he believes Greer Park is the best place for a new gym. The Cubberley plans, he noted, are proceeding on their own timeline, subject to negotiations between the city and a broader debate about redevelopment of the community center. Given the larger scale of a Cubberley redevelopment, it would also likely entail a bond measure, he said.

"It won't be with private money there because you won't have someone in the private sector to contribute something on a scale of that nature," Beecham said.

By contrast, if the city wants to build a gym with private funds, Greer Park is "the only place it'll go," Beecham said at the meeting.

Others, however, see a new Cubberley gym as exactly the type of project that could jumpstart the long delayed and endlessly debated redevelopment of the community center. Just about everyone at the meeting agreed that Cubberley, a bustling hub that includes nonprofit spaces, classrooms, art studios and other uses, desperately needs to be fixed up.

"We have such smart people in Palo Alto and great designers and planners," Cribbs said. "And I believe we could use the gym to kickstart and be the catalyst for the whole project and design around it or do what you have to do and get it started."

To date, planning for a Cubberley redevelopment has been an arduous slog for everyone involved. In 2019, the city and the school district partnered on a master plan for the community center that envisioned a jointly developed campus with new athletic facilities, performing centers, park spaces and other amenities. That vision, however, was quickly scuttled after the school district indicated that it has no desire to tear down existing facilities and it cannot help fund construction of any project that does not directly relate to education. The district also indicated that it wants to preserve land for a future school, should a need arise.

While that position effectively killed the master plan, the city and the school district are now once again discussing a property sale. And things are now moving forward very rapidly, said Council member Pat Burt, who serves on a subcommittee charged with negotiating with the district over a possible property sale.

Burt said the city and the school district have each held closed sessions on the topic in recent weeks and representatives from the two bodies are now preparing for another meeting. He also noted the board has indicated that it wants the issue resolved in the next few months, a radical departure from its historic wait-and-see approach.

"So we have a partner who is very interested in coming up with what we all wanted for a long time — a long-term agreement on Cubberley that would give us the latitude to do the sorts of things that we are envisioning," Burt said at the meeting. "That's very likely to happen very quickly. That's what makes Cubberley a possibility for a gym location."

While the question of where to build the gym remains unresolved, some residents argued Wednesday that Cubberley would clearly be their preferred location. Among them was Joe Hirsch, who works at the Cardiac Therapy Foundation, a Cubberley-based organization that provides rehabilitation programs for individuals with cardiac disease.

"We need a facility here in south Palo Alto," Hirsch said at the Jan. 17 meeting. "We always seem in south Palo Alto to be trying to catch up when facilities are placed elsewhere in the city and having a wellness center or a gym on West Bayshore Drive, near (U.S. Highway) 101 is not the best place."

Penny Ellson, who lives close to Cubberley and who has been involved in master planning efforts for the community center, said she was concerned that placing a gym at Greer Park would make it harder to build momentum for the Cubberley redevelopment because it may remove gym advocates from the existing coalition that supports the project.

"I like the idea of using a gym to inspire and bring people to the idea that Cubberley can go somewhere," Ellson said. n