Part of the Columbia Association-owned building at 4649 Columbia Road is the Dorsey's Search Meeting Room. Part of it is the nearby swimming pool's bathrooms and changing rooms.
And neither part, Dorsey's Search village officials say, is big enough.
The Dorsey's Search Village Board is asking the Columbia Association for money to expand both parts of the 27-year-old building, work estimated to cost $224,000 to $246,000.
Dan Woodruff, the village board's chairman, presented the proposal earlier this month to the CA board, which is hearing from villages and residents about its budgets for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 fiscal years.
Revamping the Meeting Room in particular — by more than doubling its size — would bring a return on that investment in terms of more rentals, Woodruff said.
"We find it hard to rent something that small on a consistent basis to bring income in. We believe it'd pay for itself, probably within 10 years," he told the CA board.
The Meeting Room is approximately 700 square feet, according to Jackie Felker, the village manager. Woodruff noted that an office and a restroom take up about one-third of that square footage.
"It's just too small a space to have a lot of utility," he said. "Right now, due to the smallness of the space, other than trying to get daycares in there, we've had a hard time renting it."
A day-care center now renting the Meeting Room can only fit about five children, he said. Woodruff declined to say how much rent the day-care center pays.
"We've had two day-care facilities outgrow the room already where our staff has had to scramble to find another rent for it," Tom Coale, the CA board member representing Dorsey's Search, said at a meeting earlier this month.
The village board's proposal says that adding onto the Meeting Room, including installing a kitchen, could bring more space for group functions, neighborhood meetings, pool parties and other activities.
The building also needs work, he said, including repairs to its roof and heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Woodruff estimated that the new addition, about 28 feet by 28 feet, or approximately 785 square feet, would cost between $136,416 and $150,057.
The proposed expansion of the pool bathrooms and changing rooms, meanwhile, would cost between $87,500 and $96,000.
"They're too small for the volume that we're doing; we're doing almost 44,000 pool visits a year," Woodruff said.
The rooms are particularly packed during swim meets when there are 200 to 300 people at the pool, he said.
"We want rooms that are larger and have more privacy," he said. "There's really not a room that has lockability where you can close a door and change. You just have to change in public, kind of like high school."
The changing rooms are approximately 300 to 400 square feet in total, according to the village's proposal. The proposed construction would expand it to between 500 and 550 square feet.
Woodruff said he wants the CA board to consider this project as separate from CA's aquatics master plan process, which is incorporating feedback from residents to help decide what improvements and changes to make to the association's pools. Woodruff said the Dorsey's Search projects "need more immediate attention," with work being done before the pool opens for the summer of 2014.
CA board Chairman Michael Cornell said he wants a commitment to updating and modernizing aging facilities, though there are several projects and limited financial resources for completing them all.
"This is something else that's going in the queue," Cornell said. "That's part of the responsibility of the board, to help prioritize these large capital projects. I'm fairly certain it'll get done."
The CA budget is in its early stages and will not be finalized until February.