Controversy over Camas tennis courts adds $12,000 to bill

Unexpected opposition to the Camas School District’s plan to cover its outdoor high school tennis courts with an all-season “bubble” and enter into a 30-year contract with a nonprofit tennis organization to run the courts will cost more than just time and patience.
As the Camas school board discovered Monday night, the tennis court controversy also comes with a more tangible cost — an additional $12,000 tacked on to a consultant’s $153,000 contract.
“As we’ve progressed through the conditional use permit process, the project has encountered a significantly higher level of public opposition and procedural complexity than anticipated in the original scope of work,” MacKay Sposito consultants told Sherman Davis, the school district’s facilities operations director, in a letter sent July 9.
The Vancouver-based consultants said their original $153,000 contract with the district assumed a permit process “with limited controversy and only minimal public involvement.”
Instead, community members — including the owners of a private tennis facility located about 5 miles from the Camas High School courts — challenged the district’s planned partnership with the United States Tennis Association Pacific Northwest organization, and asserted that enclosing the courts and opening them up to paying members of the public was not in the best interest of the community.
“Putting a public tennis center onto an existing high school campus has not been done before,” Clark Vitek, the co-owner of Evergreen Tennis, told The Columbian in March. “It’s not in the school’s best interest or the voters that approved facility bonds to convert school property to commercial use and give up control for the next 30 years while introducing traffic and safety concerns onto the school campus.”
Camas Hearings Examiner Joe Turner considered the opposition’s arguments during an April 28 conditional use permit hearing and later ruled that he had found no evidence to support claims that the covered tennis facility would negatively impact student safety or traffic near the high school.
Turner’s ruling paved the way for the district’s plans to partner with the USTA, enclose and upgrade the tennis courts, add restrooms and a lobby to create a nearly 60,000-square-foot tennis facility, and install additional parking spaces.
The agreement also transfers management of the facility to the USTA for at least 30 years, opens the district-owned courts to paying members of the public and will, according to the district, promote tennis programs for all Camas students and give the Camas High girls tennis team all-weather access to the courts for practice and matches.
“We’re not anticipating any appeals and should be out of the woods, at least for the conditional use permits,” Camas schools Superintendent John Anzalone told school board members Monday.
In their letter to Davis, MacKay Sposito consultants said the additional $12,000 was for work related to the extended public hearing, preparing “detailed responses to a high volume of public comments submitted to the city of Camas,” and additional time spent coordinating with school district staff, city planners, legal counsel and subcontractors.
“The level of effort required to date — particularly around documentation, communications and stakeholder coordination — has exceeded the assumptions and limits of the original agreement,” the consultants said in the letter.
On Monday, during their regular meeting, Camas school board members voted unanimously to approve the request for the additional $12,000, bringing the total cost of the MacKay Sposito tennis court consultants contract to $165,000.

Kelly Moyer: 360-735-4674; [email protected]