School District and MUMC fail to come to agreement over parking lot
The Manchester United Methodist Church parking lot has been the subject of a year and a half of intense negotiations between the church and the Manchester Community School District, which uses it for both athletic and special events and parking for Klager Elementary pick-up time. Photo by Fritz Swanson.
by Sara Swanson
Last week the Manchester Community Schools sent an email out to school families announcing that as of July 1, the school no longer has an agreement to use Manchester United Methodist Church’s parking lot. The lot located between the church and the athletic complex is kitty-corner to Klager Elementary. In the email, the school stated that they had offered to increase their annual usage rate for the lot from $950 to $4,000 per year and the church had rejected it. The arrangement between the school and the church dates back to 1989 and the construction of the stadium. The announcement of its sudden end took most of the community by surprise, leading to anger and speculation.
The reason behind the steep increase is that the parking lot needs to be repaved. The 140-spot lot has deteriorated to a dangerous degree, crumbling at the edges, and having already split and been resealed in numerous places. The most recent estimate to repave it is between $125,000 and $150,000. Because the school’s use of the lot outweighs the church’s, the church asked that the school pay for the majority of the re-pavement costs. The figure the church has most recently calculated is for the school to pay $13,000 a year for 10 years, a figure based on 75% of the church’s estimate for a 10-year loan to pay for the repaving. The church proposed multiple payment options, including paying all at once, paying over time, and paying the contractor directly.
Far from just using the lot on Friday nights in the fall for football games, as the original arrangement envisioned, athletic usage has expanded to year-round and all week long for games, meets, and practices of multiple sports. On top of that, Klager Elementary began requiring all parents and caregivers to park and walk up to pick up their students. The number of parents doing this increased significantly with the shortage of bus drivers and rotating canceled bus routes, filling the church lot daily. Additionally, the school has been allowing buses to be driven across and parked in the lot (and on the church’s lawn), which the church believes has been accelerating wear and tear in the back of the lot and had been prohibited in the arrangement for decades. The church calculated that 75% to 90% of the wheels in their parking lot are now for school activities. In fact, the church estimates that for their own use, they could downsize to a lot 1/4 of the size. A smaller church lot, it goes without saying, would be both cheaper to build and cheaper for the church to maintain.
Pastor Susan Hitts, who led her first service at MUMC one year ago on July 2, 2023, and inherited the parking lot negotiations from Rev. Burns, the previous pastor, stated, “Replacing a 140-space lot with $4,000 a year would require us to pay about $9,000 a year of the school’s 75% usage cost, as well as our own cost. We would also continue to have the expense of striping and plowing a 140-space spot, which is about 100 more spots than the church needs. We just do not have that kind of money.”
The last contract between the church and school expired seven years ago, in 2017. Because of changes in both school and church administrations, negotiations were not restarted until 2022. At that time all parties acknowledged that the parking lot needed to be repaved and that the annual fees would be updated to reflect the shift in usage from mostly the church to mostly the school. Hitts explained that the current annual fee of $950 (a fee established in 2012) didn’t even pay for half of the plowing. The church made a proposal in May of 2023 that the school pay $87,000 or $17,400 per year for 5 years (75% of the estimate at the time to have the parking lot replaced; replacement estimates have increased over the last year because of the rise in industry costs). Hitts reports that at one point during the meetings the school was discussing $7,000 per year with an additional payment for large events. But when the school counter-offered in May of this year, it was for $4,000 per year, which the church had to turn down.
“We simply could not pay for a large lot to be refinished and we would not make an agreement with them that would end up in a smaller lot or leave the community with a lot that continued to have pavement breaking apart and with potholes developing and grass growing through it,” Hitts stated. “It would be unethical to enter into an agreement without being able to offer long-term access to a safe parking lot at the size that it has been. It isn’t that we don’t want people there — we love people! It isn’t that we don’t want to share our resources — we love helping the community. It is just math. We can’t afford to pay to replace the entire 140-space parking lot. It came down to us not having money to pay for the part of the lot we do not need.”
When asked whether the decision was strictly financial (as in, could the district not afford it), Superintendent Brad Bezeau stated, “We are certainly open to further discussions in the future regarding the use of the lot, and we look forward to working with the Manchester United Methodist Church on other collaborations that we’ve worked on together in the past and future opportunities that have already started to present themselves, but we just weren’t able, as a Manchester Community Schools Board of Education Building and Grounds Committee, to work through their proposed $17,500 per year lease for the next five years.”
When asked what it would take to enter into a contract for use of the lot again, Pastor Hitts answered that the church is ready to right now. They just need the school to pay 75% of the cost to make it safe again. She said, “We like having the community in our parking lot, but it has to be safe. The lot is eroding at a rate in which that will be a safety issue very soon. We are not seeking to make a profit on the lot, we are only seeking to have the school pay their portion of the expenses if they want to use the lot for school activities. If the full lot size can be made safe for everyone and the church does not have to financially subsidize the school’s use of the lot, we would be happy to continue the parking lot relationship that began 35 years ago.”
One complication for the school district losing access to the parking lot is that the ticket booth and stadium entrance are situated facing the church’s parking lot. In the email Bezeau sent out last Thursday he states the school is looking at multiple options including some type of cement path on school property leading to the entrance and continued use of Klager Elementary parking and the Athletic Loop as parking, as well as a new north entry point for attendees parking in the Manchester Jr./Sr. High School Parking Lot across Dutch Drive.
He also states that they are looking at potential reconfiguration and usage of the Klager driveways.
Without money from the school, the church plans to downsize to a more affordable lot. Hitts explained that they will need to repave the lot next summer and are planning to block off the worst parts and preserve the most usable parts until then.
Hitts stated, “When I was appointed to Manchester United Methodist Church a year ago Monday (July 1), I said I wanted to be the pastor who said, ‘Yes.’ I have said yes to senior lunch programs, senior card games, the use of the church for free pet vaccines from the Humane Society, and the relocation of the Farmers Market when the heat index was too high to be outdoors. These are activities that benefit the community, which has always been the heart of Manchester United Methodist Church and aligns with my values as a pastor. We also wanted to be able to say yes to continuing our parking lot agreement. At the last meeting I had with the superintendent and the school board, I told them that we are not a prideful church, but we are too proud to ask for their help if we couldn’t pay for this on our own. We want the community to have access to this big parking lot for sports and activities. If we could pay for it ourselves and roll out the red carpet to the Manchester community to be our guests, we would. We just can’t afford to do so on our own this time.”
The athletic complex’s ticket booth opens onto the United Methodist Church’s parking lot. Photo by Fritz Swanson.
Wednesday evening, May 15, 2024, a typical spring evening in the MUMC parking lot. Although buses have been prohibited from driving through or parking in the lot since the 2007 agreement, they have been a regular presence behind the church. The church believes the bus use has contributed to the worse state of the back of the lot (nearest to the stadium) compared to the front used mostly for church parking. Photo courtesy of Rev. Susan Hitts.
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