When the Charlottesville Waldorf School moved from Crozet to its new campus off Rio Road in 2007, it left behind an aging building on a nine-acre campus that it occupied for 16 years. Now Albemarle County is trying to decide what to do with the Old Crozet School property and a consultants’ report pegs the cost of converting it to a community center at between $6 million and $8.35 million—a price tag that county supervisors aren’t willing to pay just yet.
 Consultants say the county will have to spend at least $6 million to turn the old Crozet school building into a community center. |
“I have no doubt that you want a state of the art facility, but there may be some uses of that facility that would be very valuable to the community that would not require a gigantic investment,” said Dennis Rooker at the September 3 Board of Supervisors meeting.
The cost estimates come from PMA Planners + Architects, a firm from Newport News. The consultants held several workshops with Crozet residents and concluded that the people want a community center at the old school. To make that a reality, the consultants say that heating, electrical and plumbing systems need to be replaced, environmental studies need to be conducted and all kinds of touches need to be done to bring it up to code. Add that to the cost of improved lighting and sound systems for the auditorium, and PMA estimates at least $6 million will be needed to turn it into a community center.
But that doesn’t mean that the building is about to collapse.
“We left the building basically fully functioning and in good repair with nothing near crumbling state,” says Priscilla Friedberg, Waldorf’s business administrator. “Everything worked.” Waldorf leased the building from Albemarle County from 1991 to 2007 for a price that increased from $2,500 a month to about $5,600 a month over the years.
Friedberg laughs at some of its issues. There was no air conditioning, and during the winter, “either you boiled or you froze” because of the heating system. The electrical system was spotty (“If we were at one end of the big hall and plugged in two coffee makers, we’d blow the circuit,” says Friedberg) and the basement classrooms would occasionally flood.
But the bottom line: “I thought it was great and I think most of us loved it,” Friedberg says.
In the short term, supervisors are looking at leasing the building to the private sector. Yet even if supervisors balked at the expense, they weren’t willing to toss out the idea of a community center and put the site on the market.
“This is a public resource,” said Supervisor Ann Mallek, whose district includes Crozet. “Don’t throw this away without very, very carefully investigating other options first. The community understands that there’s no pot of gold out there waiting on this.”
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