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Until recently, the site for the Weed Community Center (WCC) was in a tradeoff between two potential sites. The original Bel Air Park location had been dropped, some time ago, since the available funding would in no way be sufficient for construction of a new building on the Park site.
One proposed site was a building near the Weed Elementary school which was purported to be inadequate in size to house all of the intended usages.
The other potential site was the Weed Mercantile Mall Building which is presently housing the Weed Community Resource Center (WCRC) activities (which are described here) in addition to functioning as a multi-unit mall. The Mercantile is centrally located in Weed, and has adequate space for the planned Weed Community Center projects on the first floor. Minor modifications such as removing existing non-load-bearing partitions to provide a large unobstructed meeting/dining area could have been achieved at a reasonably low cost.
A significant advantage of the Mercantile solution was the availability of two additional floors, which would be in reserve for future cost-effective expansion of space to allow for substantially increased Weed Community Resource Center activities over a period of years. This augmentation could have proceeded in an orderly planned fashion as funding became available over several years in the future.
However, the WCC board elected against utilization of the Mercantile, lost their challenge grant from the Ford Family and McConnell Foundations, and effectively dissolved as a functioning WCC board.
At this point, the WRC plans to immediately initiate an energetic community-wide effort to develop and come together around one new coordinated Weed Community Center project, and to prepare one new grant application to the Foundations for the WCC project to be revived and receive new grant funding.
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