[0:00:01] Steve Schoeny: One of the other things that we're doing that I'm really looking forward to is we've taken some of the things that currently happen. Our senior center specifically are kind of game tables, gaming tables, not specifically gambling tables, but like pool tables, ping pong tables, and we're moving them up to the floor. That is the floor where we have a couple of gymnasiums. The day that I will be the happiest is the day that someone complains that one of our 80 year old members took money from some 16 year old in a pool game. That is the way that I will know that we have absolutely succeeded in making this truly an intergenerational community facility.

[0:00:49] Brett Johnson: We are looking forward our way from Studio C in the five one one studios in the Bridge District just south of downtown Columbus. This is Brett Carol and I have a special guest with us today, Steve Shoney, who is the city manager for the City of Up Arlington. We've been watching the success of the development of a new community center in Up Arlington and are excited that Steve is going to give us some more of the details. Steve, thanks for joining us.

[0:01:12] Steve Schoeny: Thanks for having me.

[0:01:13] Carol Ventresca: It's great to meet you and hear more about what's going on at Upper Arlington. As I mentioned to Steve before we started taping as an OSU graduate, those of you who know Central Ohio know Upper Arlington is sort of the closest neighbor.

[0:01:29] Steve Schoeny: Just up the hill.

[0:01:31] Carol Ventresca: That's right, just up the hill. So lots and lots of connections in Upper Arlington. So, Steve, thank you again for joining us today. In our podcast program, we have different tracks of topics that we cover, and one of is healthy living. And it's always interesting when Brett and I decide what's considered healthy living, and suddenly we're looking at community centers from literally not just a community standpoint, but the government standpoint. So this is kind of exciting to see how our local governmental entities have started to play a role. So we wanted to feature our facility. There are other facilities available throughout the community, but we're honing in on Upper Arlington today. Before we get into the details about the center, though, Steve, please tell us a little bit about you, your background, experiences, sort of what led you to become the city manager.

[0:02:25] Steve Schoeny: Oh, gosh, that's a long, tortured story. We've got three days, right?

[0:02:30] Carol Ventresca: Yes, exactly.

[0:02:31] Steve Schoeny: No, my last job before this is I was the development director for the City of Columbus for about six years. Development director for the City of Columbus is more than just what you traditionally think of as economic development, but it includes housing, code enforcement, planning, and a whole bunch of other duties as assigned kind of stuff.

[0:02:53] Carol Ventresca: Right.

[0:02:56] Steve Schoeny: And then I had been in economic development for a lot of years before that, but that job really brought home the breadth of what development really means to a community and that you can't just think about buildings and projects in a vacuum. You have to think about the entirety of the context that you're working in, and that includes a whole bunch of socioeconomic stuff and includes now, when we're smart about it, how do we give people the options of getting places besides just a single occupancy vehicle? In normal people terms, that means driving a car and think about different ways for people to get places and then ways for people to do things differently that make them happier, healthier, and also really come to love places because then they get involved in their communities.

[0:03:52] Carol Ventresca: Well, Upper Arlington is really a successful area to reside. It's known for its great school system, sound housing, good government. However you are landlocked, suddenly you find yourself with a really great space, a large space, a retail area that was nearly empty for a long time. Giant Eagle took a large section of the old retail mall as well. How was the decision to change the rest of that space from retail to a community wellness center?

[0:04:18] Steve Schoeny: Well, Kroger had bought the old Macy's Lazarus building, I think maybe the last of the blue brick buildings around town and back. Gosh, six, seven years ago now. Had been thinking about kind of a different kind of store concept. Long story short, they decided not to do it sitting on the property. And, you know, when I started I started a little over three years ago in city of up Arlington, the number one thing that people told me they wanted, it was they wanted something done with the blue building. Right. They wanted something done with that property. So we worked with Kroger and said, okay, it's time to move on. It's time to do something or get off the pot.

[0:05:09] Carol Ventresca: Exactly.

[0:05:10] Steve Schoeny: And they worked really well with us and said, okay, yeah, we're not going to do something. Let's go out and find a development partner to buy the land. And we said in that we want this to be the location for we want to have the option of having this be the location for a community center. Simultaneously, we were going through a process that was community led. We had a 15 member panel of folks from around the community. It was co led by Margie Pazuti. Margie used to be the CEO of Goodwill and Nick Lashaka, who is yes, for those of you who know Columbus, the name is familiar. It's Greg's son. But Nick is a community member, been very active in the community. He works for the children's hospitals association of Ohio. And Nick and Margie kind of led this 15 community member panel that looked at what all of our options are. Upper Arlington had been trying to build, considering various options for building a community center for 40 years, really. And the challenge was we are under parked not in terms of cars, but in terms of parks. And we didn't want to take up green space because green space is really valuable. But we had this site that was a challenge, but it was not going to be something that we, in a fiscally responsible way, could take control of on our own.

[0:06:48] Steve Schoeny: So continental Building. Sorry? Continental Real Estate. Continental development. Frank Cass's Company was interested in the property and put a bid on it. And we said, hey, if you put a bid on it, we would be interested in partnering with you to put a community center on that site. Lots of negotiations and long conversations with Frank and his team. We kind of figured it out to divide the site into thirds and so basically into thirds. And so there's going to be three buildings on the site. One is going to be a senior living facility, privately operated. One is going to be an apartment building that sits on top of a two story parking garage with 580 or so parking spaces.

[0:07:33] Carol Ventresca: Thank goodness, because that's going to be.

[0:07:35] Steve Schoeny: Needed in that area. It's going to be needed. And then the third part of the site is going to be a community center.

[0:07:41] Carol Ventresca: Okay. So that site that has the Giant Eagle at the other end, so that's Giant Eagle property, is that correct?

[0:07:50] Steve Schoeny: It's owned by Echo Realty and Giant Eagle leases the big.

[0:07:55] Carol Ventresca: Right. So that's sort of done. That's filled from when I've gone around to look at it. So you're really looking at is that about half of that space?

[0:08:09] Steve Schoeny: Which space?

[0:08:10] Carol Ventresca: Of the whole no area?

[0:08:12] Steve Schoeny: I'd say of that area, it's probably about a quarter of it.

[0:08:15] Carol Ventresca: Really? Okay.

[0:08:17] Steve Schoeny: That whole Kingsdale triangle. It's big.

[0:08:20] Carol Ventresca: It is very large and you don't realize it. And even driving around, it doesn't seem that big.

[0:08:25] Steve Schoeny: No. It kind of takes staring at Google Maps for a while to kind of realize how big that site is and then driving it.

[0:08:33] Carol Ventresca: So my question was getting to three buildings on that space sounds like a lot, given what those buildings are going to be. But it is a lot of good space.

[0:08:42] Steve Schoeny: It is an evolution from kind of how we've thought about suburban communities like up Arlington. But when you look at what we've done on Lane Avenue, when you look at the evolution of kind of the Fifth Avenue and Grandview Avenue, when you look at some things that have been done in Bexley oh, yeah. And that's to say nothing of Bridge Park.

[0:09:02] Carol Ventresca: I was just going to say Dublin.

[0:09:05] Steve Schoeny: You look at that progression and it is the way that communities are going because single use developments, that's not what people want.

[0:09:17] Carol Ventresca: Right. And Grandview was landlocked until all of that commercial or manufacturing area changed that they could actually make the most of that space.

[0:09:28] Steve Schoeny: Absolutely.

[0:09:29] Carol Ventresca: Yeah. Okay. All right. So, Steve, let's go actually talk about the project now. What are the goals? What do you envision for this community center?

[0:09:42] Steve Schoeny: I love analogies and the best analogy that I can use for this is if you think about our community as a house, lane Avenue is going to be our front entry way and our living room. This needs to be our kitchen, right? Okay. This is the place where the people who matter most to you come together. And so that's the big high minded, kind of trying to make myself sound smart thing. The practicality. What does that then translate to? It translates to putting in some traditional rec center kind of fitness. So we'll have a fitness floor and we'll have group fitness classrooms. We'll have three gymnasiums. And then we're going to do some other things that are a little different. We're going to move the Senior Center functions into this building and we're going to have kind of a core where we do all of our Senior programming and then we're going to have some Leasable space in there that we're very hopeful that we'll be able to work out a deal with the Ohio State University Western Medical Center for them to come in and provide some services in the building. The kinds of things they're talking about doing are like bringing the cancer survivorship center into the building, bringing some of their integrative medicine into the building, doing some physical therapy and some occupational therapy in the building, and doing those kinds of things that mesh really well with what happens in a recreation center and close to functions for our older adults. And then because we're going to be building this on a tight site, we're having to go vertical. Well, when you go vertical, it gives you the opportunity to do some interesting things with view lines.

[0:11:34] Steve Schoeny: And so up at the top of the building we're going to put some of our kind of activity rooms and really design them almost in a format that reminds you more of kind of a ballroom style. Up on the fifth floor, which will be 75ft up in the air with a balcony off of it, looking out south over the south part of Arlington and campus and all the way to downtown. And so gives us the ability to have community functions and kind of private personal functions, corporate events, weddings, that kind of stuff. There's not a lot of places in Columbus where you can do a wedding for 250 people five, six stories up in the air with a balcony where you can get away from your uncle that you don't like and look over downtown while you're hiding from them.

[0:12:24] Carol Ventresca: Right.

[0:12:26] Steve Schoeny: We think it's going to be a fantastic building that brings a lot of things together.

[0:12:30] Carol Ventresca: So you mentioned five floors. I have heard five floors. I've heard six and I've heard seven.

[0:12:36] Steve Schoeny: It depends on how you count.

[0:12:38] Carol Ventresca: Oh, there you go.

[0:12:41] Steve Schoeny: And it's changed. So part of the confusion is we have a mezzanine. So we have going to get a little bit weedy and it's hard to do verbally but in your mind's eye, if you'll envision, we have a pool on the first floor. You don't do twelve foot ceilings in a pool. This is not just going to be like the pool at the Courtyard Marriott. That first floor has to be a double height floor. Okay, so we've put a mezzanine in there. So that's where some of the confusion about how many floors do we have comes in. And then look, if you've talked to anybody who's done any commercial construction or resident, even personal residential construction, it's really expensive time to build. And we had to do some value engineering and redesign the building. And so at one point we were at seven stories. We looked and said what really needs to be in the building? And we took some things out and took a floor off the building. And actually I think it's a better building because of that process.

[0:13:41] Carol Ventresca: Okay, when you mentioned about the Osu's Wexner Medical Center coming in, the Upper Arlington OSU building, the Hyped Center, which is a wellness building, is that too? It's OSU medical offices along with a workout area.

[0:14:00] Steve Schoeny: You mean up in New Albany?

[0:14:02] Carol Ventresca: In New Albany.

[0:14:02] Steve Schoeny: Yeah. You said apart, I'm sorry, nobody and we've been working from very early on in the process with the folks who managed the height center and using that as a model. And they have been fantastic. They've been great partners the whole way through and we're excited about the partnership.

[0:14:28] Carol Ventresca: Well, there used to be an OSU building right across from there. That where the new center is going to go on.

[0:14:34] Steve Schoeny: I'm not sure it's still no, they have their own five story building that's on the south side of the Kingsdale kind of triangle on Zollinger Road. So that building is still there and they're bursting at the seams and that's part of why they're interested.

[0:14:51] Carol Ventresca: Interesting with what you just outlined, how and was the community input leading toward that path you just described?

[0:14:59] Steve Schoeny: Yeah, we've done a lot of it and Upper Arlington residents are not shy about sharing their opinions. And we spent a lot of time, I mean, the community center feasibility task force process was an 18 month process. Now there was a COVID factor in that that, you know, put us probably added six months to the process. And since then we have been doing lots of community outreach. We do surveys. People in up Arlington like to take surveys. They're very good at it. So we've been doing surveying and any chance I get to talk to groups about it, I go out and talk and listen. So we had a focus group, we had a focus group on seniors. We talked a lot with the folks who currently use our senior center, but we made sure that we got out to older adults who don't use our current senior center to find out why not, to find out what are the kinds of things that people are going to use. And look, I'm over 50 now, which makes me eligible for membership in our Senior Center.

[0:16:10] Carol Ventresca: And Arp will be contacted.

[0:16:11] Steve Schoeny: They have already there you go. For my 50th birthday, the Parks and Recreation Team, which runs the Senior Center, did make sure to drop off an application for membership form. That was very nice of them. And I say to people all the time, I'm the client that we need to be thinking about, too, because the.

[0:16:35] Carol Ventresca: Younger end of that spectrum, right?

[0:16:37] Steve Schoeny: And we're building this for 30 to 50 years. We're not building it for five.

[0:16:42] Carol Ventresca: Exactly.

[0:16:43] Steve Schoeny: And so making sure that we think forward about how are things evolving, how are how are the ways in which people age, how is that, how does that evolve? You know, we were talking beforehand. My my wife is a professor in the College of Social Work, specialized in home and community based care for those who age. So I got a little bit of a special inside consultant in terms of trends in these things. And so we've tried to be really purposeful about how we think about it. So you'll notice throughout, I have not said that we're replacing the Senior Center. We are moving the hub of our services for older adults up onto the second floor of the Community Center. We will have a senior lounge that is that hub. We've got classrooms that are designed for our senior programming hub together. We're being very purposeful about it, and so we're going to do all those things. Whether we continue to call it the Senior Center, I don't know. We may, we may not. And part of that is about being flexible and looking to the future and making sure that we don't. You know, some of the stuff we've gotten tied into is, you know, early on, there was this argument, how many square feet you're going to have for the Senior Center? Well, it's 105,000 square foot community center.

[0:18:08] Steve Schoeny: So at one level, 105,000. If you're asking how we're going to structure it so that we have the hub, this hub of our programming, that's the real conversation that we need to have. And I got it. You know, it took us a little while, but I think folks have understood that. And as they've seen the designs, I think it's become more clear because we went through a whole exercise of mapping out this program is what we have today at the Senior Center. Here's the room it's going to go into. This is the program and mapping all that out. One of the other things that we're doing that I'm really looking forward to is we've taken some of the things that currently happen in our Senior Center specifically are kind of game tables, gaming tables, not specifically gambling tables, but like, pool tables, ping Pong tables, and we're moving them up to the floor. That is, the floor where we have a couple of the gymnasiums. The day that I will be the happiest is the day that someone complains that one of our 80 year old members took money from some 16 year.

[0:19:15] Carol Ventresca: Old in a pool game. There you go.

[0:19:17] Steve Schoeny: That is the day that I will know that we have absolutely succeeded in making this truly an intergenerational community facility.

[0:19:24] Carol Ventresca: Well, when you think of it too, where it's located, I mean, for a landlocked community, this is the perfect place for a community center. You're within walking distance of the library, within walking distance of the high school. It's really sort of the center of Arlington.

[0:19:43] Steve Schoeny: Well, and that was intentional. And one of the other options that we had was to put it where the municipal building sits right now. And if you don't know Arlington at all, it's at the triangle right across from the OSU golf courses. And the tipping point for me, while there were two tipping points, one is it would have been more expensive on the positive, I would have gotten a new office. It probably would have been up top floor or a great view. But the more important thing was when we looked at it and we said how is a kid going to get there on their bike and what are going to be the barriers to getting there on their bike? And it would have meant kids would have had to go through that Five Points intersection on their bike and kids or older adults or whoever who's not trying to get there, not by a car. You would have this major barrier versus you put a quarter of a mile down the road and it is much more integrated into the community so you can get there in healthier ways. It's easier to get to it again has that feel of being in the kitchen.

[0:20:44] Carol Ventresca: I was going to say that the municipal building is really the back patio.

[0:20:47] Steve Schoeny: Yeah. Thank you. Well done.

[0:20:50] Carol Ventresca: That is really good.

[0:20:52] Carol Ventresca: That's the first thing that came to mind. No, it's not in the kitchen, it's still attached. But your backyard is the golf course. So you get your back patio with.

[0:21:02] Steve Schoeny: A great big putting green out back.

[0:21:04] Carol Ventresca: Yeah, exactly.

[0:21:05] Carol Ventresca: Nice. There you go.

[0:21:06] Carol Ventresca: It's my two cent.

[0:21:08] Steve Schoeny: My work here is done.

[0:21:09] Carol Ventresca: Exactly.

[0:21:10] Carol Ventresca: Ladies, some more questions. So for listeners who aren't familiar with central Ohio, columbus has a lot of suburban areas that are really nearly inside the city. Columbus sort of goes around Arlington, it goes around Grandview and Marble Cliff, which creates lots of challenges, I'm sure. And up Arlington is not that large, 40,000 or so people, 10 sq mi. So it doesn't sound very big, but it has packed a lot into its community. It's highly educated, close to a major university, as we mentioned. I found it interesting that the median age ranges for men and women are in the low forty s a lot of communities. It sort of skews the other way. It's either. Whitehall has been an older, older community for a long time. Some are very younger, much younger families. How does this translate into the community needs and the suggestions and things that they wanted for the center? Were there surprises in this process of what people were asking for?

[0:22:21] Steve Schoeny: No, not in the community center itself. There is a very deep love of the community from our longtime residents. And sometimes we joke about we take bets on how long it's going to take somebody to tell us how long they've lived in the community. And a lot of times that is, I've lived here for 30 years. My parents lived here, my parents parents lived here. For us, it's brought up a couple of things. One is we do have a really good sense of our older adult community and what their needs, desires, wants are. The other thing that it does is it makes us be really intentional about how we celebrate our past, but still recognize that we are a community that is trying to evolve in lots of different ways. And as I talked earlier, not thinking about this building as a replacement for the community center, but it's the evolution of how we serve our older adults. And that came up honestly, the bigger time, the bigger issue we have and you see this everywhere is particularly in suburbs like ours, is how do we have places for people to find their place to live as they age. And in a community that I refer to it as knee and hip replacement compatible housing, right? As we all age needing that kind of housing. So it hasn't really come up that much. We didn't get really any huge surprises from the older adult community in that. But as we talk to our older adults, that is the thing that comes up as the need is we love our community, we want to be able to stay in the community.

[0:24:22] Steve Schoeny: And how do we find alternative forms in the physical sense of housing?

[0:24:29] Carol Ventresca: All right, so when all is said and done, you walk up to the building, what signs are you going to see in regards to the mix retail restaurant? What are the floors going to look like in regards to if you go to the elevator and it's going to read, this floor is going to be this, this is going to be this. What's the big impression when you walk up, when it's all said and done?

[0:24:48] Steve Schoeny: So when you walk in, one of the things that we did that was really important to us is we put a couple of things before you have to go through and show your membership. So we have two things programmed in before that. One is a cafe and the other is a playground. Okay. And I will be honest, we stole the playground thing in particular from Westerville because we went toward Westerville and we don't want people to feel like you have to have a membership to have any purpose in the building. And so if you're parent who's got a little one or a grandparent who's got the little ones, and it's a nasty day where there's too hot, it's too cold, or it's too rainy or whatever, and you just need something to do with them, that was really important for us to have something there. So when you walk in the door, that's what you're going to get. So in terms of how the building is stacked, the first floor is basically the pool and the main fitness looking. The mezzanine is where we'll have some fitness classrooms and then some additional workout facilities. So if you don't feel like working out on Muscle Beach right next to me, and I'm getting my big weights.

[0:26:07] Carol Ventresca: Up and all that sort of flexing.

[0:26:09] Steve Schoeny: In front of the mirror. Exactly. We'll have a space that's a little bit removed from that so that few people feel a little bit more so they can work out in the environment they want to. And then the second floor, what will be labeled as the second floor, but it will be where we'll really have the concentration of our services for older adults. So we'll have our older adult lounge, we'll have a couple of classrooms, we'll have our art classroom. And then actually on that floor, we'll have a pretty large outdoor patio immediately off the older adult lounge, which I think is going to be really cool. So that'll be on the TREMONT side of the building. It'll be two and a half, three stories up. And so you'll be able to sit outside, have conversation. We'll set it up so that if we've got a yoga class program for the day and it's really nice out, they can move the yoga class outside, stuff like that. And then on that floor, we'll start to get some of the medical office availability. And then this feels like a test. Third floor will have the first of our gymnasiums. It'll be kind of a synthetic court. They call it a multi activity quarter mac.

[0:27:25] Steve Schoeny: So that'll be where we have the Mac gym. And we'll have some more fitness facilities, fitness equipment in there, a lot of offices on that floor. And then when we get up to the fourth floor is where we'll have our main gymnasium. So we'll have two courts, two wood basketball courts. We'll actually have an esports room. Do you guys know what esports is? Sure.

[0:27:48] Carol Ventresca: But our audience, for the audience, you tell them.

[0:27:57] Steve Schoeny: If you've got kids who are older than ten kids or grandkids that are older than ten, you probably have realized that they actually like to watch each other play video games. And playing video games has become a social thing. And so we're going to have basically a video game room and computer lab. That's the same floor on which we'll have kind of our pool tables and ping pong tables. And so when I talk about wanting and we do have a core folks in the current senior center that play that. And that's where I want my 80 year olds to take money from my.

[0:28:32] Carol Ventresca: 1415 year old, just have it on a continuous loop of color of money on video. Have that. So it's all subliminal. That the hustler and all that kind of stuff.

[0:28:47] Carol Ventresca: Steve's wife, Holly and I have known each other for a bit from our work in the senior community. Holly will tell you the younger kids are going to teach the older kids technology, and the older folks are going to teach the younger kids life, the.

[0:29:05] Carol Ventresca: Art of the hustle.

[0:29:07] Carol Ventresca: Yeah, but it's life skills.

[0:29:10] Steve Schoeny: Well, and what's interesting is that desire to pull the analog gaming out of the senior area was actually voiced by the kids and a desire for them to have opportunities to interact with members of the older members of our community. I think that's just awesome.

[0:29:33] Carol Ventresca: That's cool.

[0:29:33] Carol Ventresca: Yeah.

[0:29:34] Steve Schoeny: And then the top floor is where we'll have the kind of ballroom, and there will be a walking track above the two gymnasiums. I'm a basketball guy. We're going to have the coolest basketball courts in town, cool the hands down, because there will be four or five stories up and the north wall, so not south wall, so we're not going to turn it into a sauna. But the north wall will be all glass. So you'll be playing basketball. And for people like me, it's an excuse. I missed my jump shot because the.

[0:30:02] Carol Ventresca: Light well and it's that anti gravitational pull. So you can do a lot more dunks.

[0:30:08] Steve Schoeny: Yeah, I'm still not going to be dumped.

[0:30:11] Carol Ventresca: There you go. The notion of programming between the generations is not new, hard to do, and oftentimes a good friend of mine. I'm going to give a shout out to Laura Kerry in Gerard, Ohio, who's the director of a group called the Gerard Multigenerational Center. And it's where little one these are little little ones like daycare Head Start kinds of programs, are in with their traditional senior center in an old school in Gerard. And so lots of great ideas and things can happen when you're mixing the little ones.

[0:30:51] Steve Schoeny: Particularly, I should have noted we will have on the first floor some child watch space. So not a full day care center by any means, but if mom needs somewhere for the kids to hang out while she does an hour long yoga class, we've got that. And they need watched, we've got that, too. But Holly, actually, some of her very early research was in intergenerational program.

[0:31:16] Carol Ventresca: Right. It's not unheard of. It's just really hard to program because space needs are so different.

[0:31:26] Steve Schoeny: It's hard to program. And so some of what we've tried to do is make collisions more likely, less likely in the physical sense, more likely in the social sense, and really try and set things up. So. That we do encourage interaction without having to program interaction. Because if you program it, kids won't do it, teenagers won't do it.

[0:31:50] Carol Ventresca: Right.

[0:31:52] Steve Schoeny: But if you make it so it's likely to happen, then people do what comes natural to it.

[0:31:59] Carol Ventresca: Well, as a member of the Westerville Community Center, let me tell you, silver sneakers is the best thing. And so don't forget, so every single.

[0:32:09] Steve Schoeny: Meeting we have with our senior advisor, trust me, we've heard, don't forget senior sneakers or silver sneakers. Silver sneakers will be part of our Reimbursement program. We will make sure that that works exactly. We'll get all that in there exactly.

[0:32:22] Carol Ventresca: Because it's what a great opportunity and it's not going to cost the center per se.

[0:32:29] Steve Schoeny: And it's a great vehicle for our older adults. And we're always trying to be cost conscious about things and recognize that if you're on a fixed income, participating in this kind of stuff will be hard. One of the things that we actually have done, an idea that came out of our community center feasibility of task force process that we've actually gone ahead and implemented before the community center was we recognized that we needed a revenue stream to help out our residents who can't afford to participate in our programs. So this year, we've added a one dollars transaction fee to every registration that we do for all of our recreation programs that goes into financial assistance fund.

[0:33:19] Carol Ventresca: Wonderful.

[0:33:20] Steve Schoeny: And that was one of those great ideas that came out of the community center feasibility task force process that we said, this is too good to wait on.

[0:33:28] Carol Ventresca: And, you know, that is amazing that the community is stepping up because everyone hears Upper Arlington and assumes everyone has more than enough money to have a.

[0:33:42] Steve Schoeny: Great life, but that's not a more diverse community than you think. And look, if we've learned nothing over the last two years, we've learned that somebody's always going through something, right? And if we're good members of the community, we prepare to step up. And that's the other thing we've learned, is you got to be ready to step up. And this is something that kind of gets us ready to step up, right?

[0:34:08] Carol Ventresca: One of the things that I think is interesting and I've not heard anything, this is just a thought that I had as I was preparing our questions for today. Are community centers overall that are under a city or a village or a town? Are they getting backlash or pushback from places like Planet Fitness and the others that are privately owned?

[0:34:35] Steve Schoeny: Yes and no. Look, if you're running a general purpose kind of workout place, it can be a little hard to stare this in the face. That said, Orange Theory opened up a brand new location in the Kingsdale Shopping Center after we announced that we were doing this. And they look at it and say, you know what, if you have a community that's fitness oriented, the community center is not going to be for everybody. We have enough of a niche that we think we can still make it work.

[0:35:11] Carol Ventresca: That you do. You do. We us kind of thing. Each offers something different.

[0:35:16] Steve Schoeny: Well, believe it or not, even in government, we look at what is our core competency, what are we going to do? Well, we know we're not going to do high intensity training classes that focus on cycling, running, and what do they do? Rowing machines or weightlifting or whatever. Whatever it is that they do that they have a very loyal base for. And they're smart enough business people to know that if they focus on what they're best at and we focus on what we're best at and there's not overlap, there's plenty of opportunity for everybody.

[0:35:52] Carol Ventresca: Well, and there's nothing that says that you can't work out at Orange Theory and then go play basketball at the community center a few steps away.

[0:36:00] Steve Schoeny: Absolutely. Except for your body wanting to be dead after work.

[0:36:05] Carol Ventresca: Those 18 year olds.

[0:36:09] Carol Ventresca: You mentioned earlier about working and taking advantage of what Westerville Center has done and other area facilities, I guess I wanted to kind of dig into that a little bit more, too, of who you used as an example. You got some feedback from around the country, around Central Ohio. Some examples.

[0:36:27] Steve Schoeny: Yeah. So Westerville has done a really good job, and they had just redone theirs. Mason, down north of Cincinnati, the whole concept of kind of how do you partner with a health system? We really studied them and studied their pro forma in terms of how they make theirs work financially. Dublin has got a great facility that we know well, and then we hired really good design firms that we have a really good design team that has designed these things and actually had designed university health and wellness centers. Because of the physical form that ours is taking, it's going to feel much more like a university health and wellness center, which, honestly, for a community like Upper Arlington, where you do have the high level of education, I think will feel really good for our residents and really familiar for our residents. And I love the fact that we're not going to use excess acreage to do this. It's a different way of doing it. But I love the fact that we're going to innovate and really try and put this on a tighter site so that people can use it in the healthiest way possible.

[0:37:37] Carol Ventresca: How will the community center be? I want to say governed. That's not the right word. Is it going to be part of Parks and Rec or how is it going to okay.

[0:37:47] Steve Schoeny: It'll be our Parks and Rec team. We have a fantastic team. Part of the reason that this is all going to work financially is we've been doing a lot of the activities that we already do just in kind of crappy facilities or kind of beg bar of steel facilities and there's a lot of inefficiency in that operationally. So from a full time staff standpoint, we're not going to have to add a lot of full time staff. We'll have to add some part time staff to man the facility. But we will be charging a membership fee just like everybody else does. And we're pretty confident that keeping it in line with what the other suburban communities and the Y charge for their fees will be able to make it work without breaking the bank from an operating standpoint.

[0:38:35] Carol Ventresca: Yeah, I think a lot of suburbs are looking at that of really focusing on live, eat, and play here and some of those, like, City of Whitehall prime example, that they really refigured what they wanted to do as they could rebuild because they did the same thing. Buy this, buy this, buy this, and we're going to redevelop it of looking at it as, hey, you're here. We want you to stay here. If at all possible, we want you to be able to live here and eat here and play here. 25, 30 years ago, cities really weren't developed that way per se.

[0:39:06] Steve Schoeny: Well, and shout out to Mayor Maggart. Kim is a rock star dynamo and a rock star and truly a visionary. And what Kim has managed to do there, it's phenomenal. It is amazing. And the other piece that comes into this is this isn't just a kind of community health play for us. Cities in Ohio are funded by income tax. And with the work from home phenomenon, there's this new thing where it's not just about getting office buildings, but it's two things. One is getting office buildings that people want to come to, and the reason they want to come to them is because you can do more stuff and be more productive overall for your life than you can at home. And so that's about having restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacies, dry cleaners right. And things like a community center. Plus. Then the other thing is now if I have a spouse who has to go to the office and a spouse who doesn't, I want to live in a community where the spouse who doesn't has all these other assets that they can use and other places to go when I just can't stare at the same four walls again. And we've tried to design some space in the community center that really does make this be a place where if you're a family that's trying to choose where to go for one or two work from home folks or folks who are working from home two or three days a week, it makes it even more attractive. Right.

[0:40:49] Carol Ventresca: At the Westerville Center, if you are a city resident, there's a specific cost, but you could be a member without being a city resident. Will that be also open for your center?

[0:41:02] Steve Schoeny: That will be the case. And also our resident rate applies to folks who work in the city as well.

[0:41:10] Carol Ventresca: That was my next question.

[0:41:12] Steve Schoeny: I refer to it as our taxpayer rate because cities run on income tax and income taxes paid where you work. And so the folks who work in UA are helping to support this with the tax dollars that we need, and so they should have that same benefit.

[0:41:28] Carol Ventresca: You know, one of the things we we've brought up mayor Maggard and her team from from Whitehall. Brett and I have had great opportunities to work with the Whitehall Group in our previous world of nonprofit management. One of the things that she did with their community center is it's a partnership with the Y. Are there other partnerships that you're coming up with in your center other than OSU?

[0:41:51] Steve Schoeny: Really? The the OSU one is the one that we've concentrated on. We talked with the folks at the Y. Tony Collins and I used to work together at City Columbus. We overlap together, and Tony's a good friend, but we really decided that because, as I said earlier, we have so much of the programming in place already, it didn't make sense for the Y to come in. Reynoldsburg yeah, reynoldsburg built theirs as a partnership with the Y. Part of that was because they didn't have the programming in place already. And so rather than create their programming infrastructure, the Y was not only able to bring in the building management, but the programming infrastructure.

[0:42:28] Carol Ventresca: Right.

[0:42:29] Carol Ventresca: That makes sense.

[0:42:31] Carol Ventresca: So, Steve, I can't believe we're already buzzing through this podcast pretty quickly. One of the things that we always ask our guests to do is to sort of give some final last words of wisdom. Our audience may be Upper Arlington residents, they may be Central Ohio residents, they may be residing someplace around the country. What are the kinds of things that you hope people are doing in utilizing their community services and being participating in helping make those decisions, too?

[0:43:06] Steve Schoeny: I think the biggest thing is to connect and have conversation. And one of the things that I think we lost in the pandemic was that and with other things going on in the broader kind of I don't know if zeitgeist is the right term, but I'll say the zeitgeist of everything in our civic discussion these days is the ability to have conversation. And this is where I'm going to work in my shameless plug. One of the things that we did at the City was my city attorney and I started a podcast that we call Won't You Be Our Neighbor?

[0:43:43] Carol Ventresca: Oh, nice.

[0:43:45] Steve Schoeny: Not. Won't you be my neighbor? But won't you be our neighbor? And the entire concept is we talk a little bit about we have one segment that does a little bit of city stuff. Like, we talked about snow removal, and we've talked about stuff with police, and we talked about a couple, and then we just bring on somebody from the community who we think is kind of interesting and just talk. So last week this was really fun. Chris Holtman, who's the head basketball coach for OSU, was a UA resident. So we interviewed Chris Holtman. We've interviewed Lisa Ingram, who's the CEO of White Castle. We interviewed Jenny Bauer. So when you talk about things being healthy, I was going to make the joke about, for me, health. I'm always trying to justify if there's some Jenny's ice cream flavor that has something healthy as the ingredient, then it's healthy.

[0:44:38] Carol Ventresca: But ice cream is dairy. That's healthy.

[0:44:40] Steve Schoeny: That's true. It's protein. Exactly.

[0:44:43] Carol Ventresca: I was in Nashville and saw Jenny's ice cream and we were telling them, well, we're from Columbus and these young kids are like, so they didn't get it.

[0:44:53] Steve Schoeny: But what we've tried to do is really encourage people to just have conversations about big issues. And if you can have conversations about eight big issues, then they don't seem quite so big and people aren't quite so scary. And that's part of the overall house. So building places like this are about building connections and building the good kinds of collisions and kind of creating that kitchen table or the breakfast bar or wherever it is that you get stuff done and have conversation at the same time.

[0:45:35] Carol Ventresca: We hope in our podcasting that we're bringing in experts that can give this incredible advice and providing resources for our audience. But I guess one of the things that we always talk about is that notion of communications and connecting with people. Don't lose the opportunity of taking advantage of giving your opinion and you may our may not like the outcome, but you know, you've been part of the process and that helps. Thank you again for coming and thank.

[0:46:09] Steve Schoeny: You for doing this. These kinds of as I said, conversation matters and doing these kinds of things and doing things to get people thinking and talking and maybe even occasionally laughing, it's important work.

[0:46:24] Carol Ventresca: Thank you.

[0:46:25] Carol Ventresca: Well, thanks for joining us today, listeners, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to check out our Show Notes for contact information. We're going to include resources in the Show Notes and on our website lookingforwardourway.com, and a link to their podcast as well too. So check that out. You bet. We're looking forward to hearing your feedback on this and other podcast episodes.