Fundraising helps Community Boating Center plan these new facilities
The Community Boating Center is about to build classrooms, showers/changing stalls and restrooms plus a small boat launch dock to better serve its growing number of users.
The nonprofit, founded in 2006, fosters safe small-boat recreation on Bellingham Bay from the center in Fairhaven.
“We’ve grown about 300 percent in the last two years,” Bryan Rust, executive director of the Community Boating Center, said in a telephone interview. “So, we’ve tripled the scale of pretty much all our programs.”
Overall, participation, including rentals, has increased from 2,431 people in 2020 to 4,218 people in 2021. To accommodate the growing number of participants, the Community Boating Center has cleared out its workshop to make a community room for this season.
“I started in May of 2020 and at that point, we were hosting one class at a time in an outdoor tent classroom space,” Rust said. “Since then, we’ve converted some other (outdoor) space so then we went to two. Just this season we’ve cleared out our workshop building, which is this beautiful, historic boat shop in our campus, but it’s our only fully indoor classroom space.”
“The building project would have six changing stalls that have a toilet and a shower all in one stall, three of which would be ADA (compliant),” Rust said. “There’s a second story for the building that would be kind of a community/multipurpose space that we could host programs or events in and then there would be a big deck overlooking the water. On the ground floor, under the deck, in the back of the building on the water side, there is going to be an outdoor classroom space.”
For 15 years, the Community Boating Center has run with no sewage connection and just porta-potties outside of their former workshop building.
“We need these resources as soon as possible,” Rust said. “We serve over 4,000 people here in our programs and we have two porta-potties and one changing shed.”
Community partners including Lummi Boys and Girls Club, Shifting Gears and Vamos Outdoors have helped begin fundraising for this project.
“The fundraising was kicked off with Rotary Club of Bellingham,” Rust said. “They awarded us their Major Project grant, which is about $75,000. We’ve gotten another bit of private donation and grant funds secured and we’re hoping to go public with the capital gain campaign this summer and go to our community to ask to help us with this project.”
Rust said the goal to start construction is late fall after their season is up and to have it all done by next season.
“The builder anticipates about six months at the most,” Rust said. “I think if we can’t get it started in this next fall then we might wait a full year cycle so that the construction doesn’t interfere with our programming.”
The Community Boating Center has been working with local architect David Christensen to design this new building and Mike Hammes the CEO of RAM Construction to work on the construction logistics.
The Port of Bellingham recently signed a lease with the boating center to increase the leased area by nearly 2,000 square feet.
Along with a new building to help accommodate their needs, Rust said the Port of Bellingham approved putting in another small boat launch dock near the center that will reduce competition for getting on the water.
“That is kind of the most critical next step of our evolution,” Rust said. “When that dock is in place, all the non-motorized watercraft community will have their own space to access the waters in Fairhaven and that’s pretty critical. I think that the new project will support the existing growth and certainly will help catalyze the future growth.”
These projects will benefit the Community Boating Center in its off-season as well.
“We’re working with the Bellingham School District to host field trips for the entire sixth grade class of Shuksan Middle School,” Rust said. “This is the first time we’ve ever partnered with them and if this goes well, I think they’d like to extend that to all sixth-graders in Bellingham.”
Rust added having a warm space to work with kids on chalk talks before and after they get on the water or to run marine science activities in hopes of getting them more comfortable with getting on the water is a big step.
“We’ve had to get pretty creative to support the growth,” Rust said.
Information about the Community Boating Center can be found on its website including classes, rentals and hours of operation.
This story was originally published May 9, 2022 at 9:47 AM.
CORRECTION: The amount of the Rotary Club of Bellingham Major Project grant was corrected May 19, 2022.
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