Vice Mayor Mallicote first was against and now is for aquatic center location
Vice Mayor, prior to his re-election, was very vocal and voted with Alderman Marsh and Shull against putting the Kingsport Aquatic Center in the MeadowView area. He made the following statement below.
Kingsport Times News Published August 27th, 2008
“Kingsport needs an aquatic center to be downtown. It’s more convenient for more Kingsport residents than Meadowview. If the goal is to make the center only accessible to the affluent and tourists, then absolutely it should go to Meadowview. If it’s something for the entire community, then it needs to go downtown,” Mallicote said. “Supermarket row is blighted, rundown and ugly. If the city doesn’t redevelop it, who’s going to do it? If the city can’t afford to do it, point to the developer who could do it. The reasons stated why we can’t do it downtown are the reasons why Kingsport should put it downtown.
“It’s the heart of Kingsport, and 20 or 30 years down the road, we’ll live or die by the strength of downtown.”
However in the short video clip below you can hear Ben Mallicote state that he will be excited to put the shovel in the ground. I guess he can change his mind because he got re-elected. So much for his conviction about putting the aquatic center downtown.
At an BMA meeting in early 2009, Kingsport stated that they would do the following in the quote from the Times-News below. .
Kingsport Times-News Published February 14th, 2009
Kingsport plans to solicit input from the public through the city’s Web site, Channel 16 and public meetings. The Web site will also be updated periodically with updates and notices of meetings.
Construction was to start around the third quarter of 2009. It looks like none of the above has happened or maybe won’t happen. If it does happen, it will more likely be, here it is and this is how it is going to be.
Chris McCartt in the video talks about future expansions and the citizens of Kingsport should be prepared to spend more money to fund the expansions. The cost for the first phase of construction is about $15 million.