It’s been almost two years since Soldotna voters overwhelmingly supported construction of a community field house. The first round of bonds have been sold, and construction is well underway.
Under a cloudy Friday sky, workers clad in neon safety vests chip away at the 42,000-square-foot Soldotna Field House.
A crane holds an American flag over the site, where crews have erected the first of the building’s steel walls. When complete, the field house will feature a multi-purpose sport court, removable turf field and an elevated walking and jogging track.
When city voters approved the project in 2022, they gave the city permission to incur up to $15 million in debt to build the field house. But, the city didn’t take out all of that money at once. Instead, they broke it out into two chunks.
The first chunk was $10 million, which the city sold a few months after the election. Now, City Manager Janette Bower says the city’s not sure it actually needs all of the remaining $5 million to cover project costs.
“Our concern has been all along — we don’t want to take out all of it if we don’t need all of it,” Bower said.
Soldotna City Council members voted on Wednesday to take a somewhat unusual next step in their plans to pay for the project. Rather than selling off the remaining bonds and getting a $5 million deposit in its coffers, the city is opening a line of credit at a local bank. The city can rack up $5 million worth of charges and then pay off the balance with bond debt.
“This allows us to have this line of credit, use the funding we need and then when the project is done to pay for the line of credit with the bond,” Bower said.
When the city decided to go that route, it reached out to three banks. Two responded. Of those, Soldotna's finance director and bond attorney picked Northrim Bank.
Steve Manley is the bank’s branch manager and has been working with the city on their request. He told the council Northrim is giving the city a special interest rate on its line of credit — about 4.8%.
“Our rate proposed had to do with our interest in being part of this project,” he said.
On Wednesday, council members unanimously backed the line of credit idea. Here’s councilman Dan Nelson.
“It seems to me this is a very wise, conservative approach to make, to doing this,” Nelson said. “We’re not taking on any more debt than the project would require.”
The city hopes to wrap up work on the project next year.
