East Chicago will have a brand new, centrally located “mega” community center by December 2017, if all goes as planned.
This, as well as other added amenities, will be on deck for the city, Mayor Anthony Copeland said during his State of the City address Wednesday afternoon. From new public safety equipment to more bike paths, the mayor said residents have plenty of which to be proud.
The community center plan originally started out as four individual community centers to replace the seven already existing in the city, Copeland said. Multimedia director Steve Segura then took a poll on social media to see what residents wanted and found 90 percent of those who voted preferred one big community center.
“It made us stop and pause,” Copeland said. “We have seven community centers now in each neighborhood, and we were proposing four. One center would make us unified.”
One center will also be much more expensive: The four community centers were estimated to cost $2.3 million each, or $9.2 million. The one giant one, on the other hand, will cost $16 million but will also have amenities such as a swimming pool, where the others couldn’t accommodate one.
“We needed to be bold,” Copeland said.
The mayor said the city has secured $13 million in bonds already for the center’s construction; the other $3 million will be paid out of gaming money, as will funds to repay the bond issue.
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Copeland also gave a nod toward the city’s new water filtration plant, a project that “proved trying at times.” Now that it’s complete, it produces 17.3 million gallons of drinking water per day, he said.
With the city’s marina under new leadership, the mayor said $1 million has been granted to make improvements to it. Another $30 million in private investment came in to the city’s Harbor section.
“The Harbor had declined over the years and was written off by many. Look at it now — new homes, new commercial buildings,” Copeland said. “The transformation of the Harbor is so dramatic, you can literally see the positive change.”
The city also demolished more than 350 buildings, motivating homeowners to care for their own properties, and workers will complete 11 miles of a fiber optic data network that will run through commercial districts.
Copeland emphasized the city’s balanced budget and vowed to continue using gaming revenue for infrastructure, not payroll. The minimum wage in the city has also been raised to $11.
“Our focus this year will be to make East Chicago a better place to live, work and invest,” he said.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.