Improvement Plan for our Field

Hello MAR/C Members,

Our club continues to thrive even with the challenges of today’s society. Members of all ages find our airfield a safe and enjoyable escape, visiting it to retreat from the stress and pressures of daily life.  The MAR/C board of directors has been exploring potential ways to improve club facilities and ensure the long-term viability of our precious resource.  

It has come to our attention that King County Parks is working on a new Master Plan for Marymoor Park, which is expected to go into effect in a few years.  There are always varied interests in the community and last time this happened in the 1990s, an outside consultant suggested repurposing the R/C field.  Herb Bone did a ton of work to fix that and extended our access to the field.  To further strengthen our community support and ensure our long-term lease for the airfield, the MAR/C board is proposing to beautify our field in more permanent and useful ways.

Our vision is to remove the unsightly storage containers and replace the aging charging station with more aesthetically pleasing and permanent structures.  The new charging shelter will accommodate more equipment and improve spectators' view of the field.  A new garage will  be used for storage of our training fleet and lawn care equipment as well as other potential uses.  This would beautify our field and ensure that we will continue to be an asset to Marymoor Park. 

Preliminary discussions with park management have been encouraging.  Starting the project this year may allow us to negotiate a new Special Use Agreement (SUA) with the Park, before the new master plan.  This would secure our place in the park early in the planning process.

This will be a significant investment, even though over the years we have been strategically saving for expenses of this nature.  While our bank account is in good shape, we will still need help with funding, construction and management skills from you, our members, to keep the cost reasonable and retain a healthy balance on the books.  We are pursuing potential outside funding assistance, but do not know yet if this will be possible. 

Of course we want YOUR feedback and ideas, so we will present this in more detail in our February virtual club meeting on Zoom.  The pictures below are just a teaser.

In the meantime, if you have experience or resources that could help, feedback, ideas, or questions, please contact us through the website contact page or email us at admin@mar-c.org.

  -- Brian Kelly (BK1), and your Board of Directors

 

Field Improvement Plan View
Top view of new charging shelter and location, and new prefab "garage"
Field Improvement Pano View
Panoramic view of new charging shelter and prefab  "garage".