Fort Lupton's Recreation Center might have been a long time coming, but the renovation on the project should take less than a year, according to city officials.

The City of Fort Lupton broke out the shovels to celebrate the Recreation Center renovation groundbreaking ceremony Sept. 5.

Among the dignitaries, building staff and city officials digging spadefuls dirt was  Marlene Stieber, Mayor Zo Hubbard's mother and one of the original members of the committee that built the original recreation center. 

"We worked on it for years," said Stieber after the groundbreaking ceremony. "Don Cummings and Joe Martinez, back in 1959, put together some kind of a sports program for the city, something to do for kids. I'd been with another society and they needed a volunteer and I was on that committee from 1959 to 1991."

Stieber also worked for the city and drove a school bus twice weekly to take the students to the roller rink. 

"We kept working on the plan for the recreation center," she said. "It was the late 1990s we kept talking about it and pushing to build a recreation center. With city approval we got a crew together to build it and worked on it for a long time."

The original center was nice enough to garner national headlines, she said.

"The building still looks so good. When the gym was built, with plumbing and electrical, it was all ready for expansion. We had the idea one day to add a swimming pool so it was already thought about before the expansion, " Stieber said.

Her daughter is just as excited about the expansion.

"Twenty years in the making, and I'm excited. When I was a child growing up here we didn't have a recreation center," said Fort Lupton Mayor Zo Hubbard.

Room to grow

The Fort Lupton Recreation Center has been popular with the community since it opened its doors in 2002. But lately, with the city's growth, there was a need to expand the facility.  The renovation will give the center room to start new programs as well as an additional gym, a fitness center and a warm water swimming pool.

The center will remain open for business during the renovation project, with some sections closing during different sections of the work, said Monty Schuman, Fort Lupton Recreation Center director.

"It's nice to get this started to complete the project. We started it 21 years ago, but we didn't have the funding to do it all; we designed the library for its expansion," Schuman said.  "We need the extra space. The fitness rooms are getting crowded; the warm water pool will be an excellent addition for the people."

Park phase completed

According to officials, the project's first phase wrapped up this summer. That included renovation work on the park attached to the recreation center, Community Center Park. It entailed building a mile of concrete trails around the Community Park Center that connect to the city-wide trail system.

Additional park improvements included building an outdoor splash pad area, an on-site restroom facility, ADA-accessible playground equipment, shade structures, picnic tables, and a safer high-traffic pedestrian area.

The cost included the City of Fort Lupton funding, a Great Outdoors Colorado Grant of $790,000, a  $410,000 grant from Weld Trust, and Dales Pharmacy's $20,000 challenge grant, which helped offset some of the total park project cost.

Jesse Sherr, of Perkins and Will Architects, is the senior project architect for the expansion work.

 "We will build a new gymnasium and an indoor warm pool. We are excited to complete a project that we planned for 21 years ago for a growing community, and we are proud to be part of it," Sherr said.

"This city is so good and is growing so fast, and so many of these families are ready for the swimming pool when they get home from work," Stieber said. "When I came outside, there was a young man that had been in the hot sun all day and he said he could hardly wait the hot tub.".