Update on James E. Russell Sports Center shows lower-than-anticipated revenue

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Planning and Community Development Director Jason Welker recently walked the council and mayor through an update on the James E. Russell Sports Center, which has been open to users since December 2024 — the biggest takeaway being that it isn’t generating the hoped-for level of revenue.

Welker’s presentation at the regular March 5 meeting of the City Council was based on stats related to users of all categories going back to Feb. 3, and showed that there are between 120-130 monthly members so far.

“That is below what we projected when we planned the facility,” he said.

The JER Sports Center was made possible by a more than $7 million gift from the Russell family, envisioned as an indoor court sports facility. While James E. Russell, for whom the center is named, was an avid tennis player, the vast majority of the facility is devoted to pickleball — 14 of the courts are striped for that sport, versus four for tennis.

The development was contentious among many members of the public, who opposed its impact on Travers Park and the removal of dozens of mature trees.

The interior of the James E. Russell Sports Center before it opened to the public in December 2024. Courtesy photo.

Welker said revenue since opening has been about $2,000 per week in user fees, with membership dues adding another $5,000 a month, which means the facility is bringing in about $13,000 per month.

“I will say that’s below what we anticipated and what we would hope for,” said Welker, who as a council member voted to accept the Russell family’s gift and supported the development from his position at the dais.

“The good news,” he added, “is as the weather warms, the costs of operating the facility are going to go down”

Specifically, costs of utilities — which he said “are shockingly high” at about $3,000 per month — will be lessened but also operating hours will be reduced. However, that’s because City Hall anticipates fewer people will be using the indoor space as the season allows for more outdoor play.

“We’re just going to be open less at the sports center. We’re going to start scaling back,” Welker said. “We might close a couple days a week, pare the staffing levels down because we just don’t need to be open when the preferred area for players is outside on the free tennis courts and pickleball courts that we have in town.”

Later in the meeting, Mayor Jeremy Grimm asked Welker to put some finer numbers to the analysis of how JER has been performing. As Grimm pointed out, pickleball use is upward of four times greater than tennis. He wondered if that reflected the actual demand for the sport, or if the facility were to accommodate more tennis courts, it would increase that category of use.

Welker said the local pickleball club regularly brings together groups of 20 to 30 people at a time, which makes it the “largest representation of users so far.”

Meanwhile, Welker said that he’s a tennis player and has used the courts between 12 and 15 times since December.

“Maybe once out of those 12 times have I seen all four [tennis] courts being used. It’s usually a mix of one or two tennis courts being used and then six pickleball courts being used,” he said, adding that he typically uses the center during peak hours, around 5 p.m.

“There’s rarely demand for all four tennis courts, from what I’ve seen,” he said.

However, that is changing as high school tennis season ramps up, with Sandpoint High School, Lake Pend Oreille Alternative High School, Valour Christian High School and the Homeschool Academy all booking time on the courts.

Regardless, the numbers aren’t penciling out so far, based on what the city planned for when it invested the Russell family gift into the site.

“We had community members in the tennis and pickleball community telling us that 300 was not an unreasonable estimate in terms of the paying members; so far we’re about 120, so the base membership revenue is half of what we had budgeted,” Welker said. “So the total budgeted revenue for the year was around $240,000. We’re on track to do about half of that right now.”

But that’s not to say that the community isn’t using JER — rather, Welker said he routinely sees the space “packed” with a combination of court sports users, people walking the perimeter of the space, community space users and the SHS lacrosse team using the facility for practice. Trout Unlimited will even host an indoor fly fishing instructional course at JER.

However, a large proportion of that use is occurring during “community court” times when there are no fees.

“The community court times are packed, and there’s a plus side and downside of that,” Welker said. “Those are people who are playing for free and we want that — that’s something we wanted. It’s a community space. If you’re a city resident, you know there’s a benefit that allows you to use it.”

However, Welker added, the city hoped that more people would put up the money to become members. In the absence of an upward trend in paid use, “Maybe we have to scale back the community court times to every other day in the future,” he said. “There might be something there just to kind of nudge more people to help us maintain the facility with the membership.”

Grimm reminded the council and staff that the city’s budget for the JER Sports Center “borrowed heavily against some of our reserves for Parks and Rec, and we kind of put ourselves out there to fund it this year, but we’re going to have to figure out and, I think, really support our staff and think creatively [about] how this facility runs.”

Grimm added that his perspective on citizens’ priorities are “their toilets flushing, their water turning on, the police coming, the fire [department] coming, the roads being paved. Planning, arts/culture, parks and recreation are secondary priorities, but we don’t even have enough money to do the first five at the level we want. 

So this great gift that’s been presented to our community, we can’t allow it to become a further drain on our insufficient resources,” Grimm said.

He encouraged council and staff to think about and monitor the facility to find ways to “keep this available to the public in its current format.”