FAIRBORN — Fairborn City Council passed a resolution March 21 to support the Dayton Juniors Volleyball Club in its application for an Ohio Department of Natural Resources grant in the range of $50,000 to $500,000 to help fund its construction of a 30,000-square-foot facility at 860 W. Yellow Springs Fairfield Road.

“We’re still in the preliminary stages of everything right now,” said Fairborn City Engineer Lee Harris. “We’re looking through all the necessary zoning information to make sure the club can get in compliance.”

Harris said that the club has already designed its tentative layout of where it would like the new facility to reside. He added that the fuller engineering design has yet to be completed, however.

“They are looking to put this new volleyball facility in,” Harris said, “and are right now working to getting a grant that will help fund their ability to re-establish a swale and for construction that would help improve drainage in that area. That’s where they’re currently at in the process.”

Harris recounted Monday night’s council meeting, elaborating that the council members were looking to help support the club in its efforts to acquire such grant funding.

“We wanted to show our support by passing a resolution about this support that will help the club during its grant application process, which will take another two weeks before finalizing,” Harris said. “The grant would not only benefit their construction site and ditch improvement but would also help benefit the surrounding businesses with the drainage issues that they do have there by allowing the water to slope better off of and through there.”

For Harris and the council members, the construction of a new sports and recreational facility would “definitely be beneficial to the city. One, it would be a new business coming into town, which would mean we would have the additional revenue from that business. And, two, it would bring in an organization that would help support teens and kids in giving them an additional outlet for sports and having something to do after school right here in the city.”

“We’re always looking for new things to keep kids busy and occupied,” Harris said.

Harris and city administrators have already been speaking at length with surrounding businesses, he added, focusing especially on the drainage issues in the vicinity where the new facility would be built.

“The way to resolve a lot of these issues is to get all of those private entities to work together,” Harris said. “This will help get the water to the tension pond they already have and to possibly enlarge it, as well, because it’s currently undersized. Then we’d need to get the water out of the site and downstream as efficiently as possible.”

Due to the fact that the site in question was established decades ago, Harris said “they didn’t quite have a whole lot of knowledge of storm water, and so it really wasn’t in the forefront of everyone’s mind. Unfortunately, we’re currently under-designed or not designed up to current standards. The best way to remedy and fix the flooding issues is to get the surrounding businesses there to work together and come up with a solution that will allow for the improvements that are necessary to alleviate the flooding in the area. This is probably step one in getting to that point.”

“This is just another benefit of us getting behind the club,” Harris added. “They’re willing to help make those improvements to not only make their site better but the neighboring businesses as well.”

Harris said he believes that the process of moving forward on construction is a “fairly quick time frame,” particularly as the club’s engineers are finalizing their grant application presently.

“The Dayton Juniors Volleyball Club’s goal is to start construction this year,” Harris said. “I believe they’ll have the facility open by this winter or early next spring. That’s going to depend on a lot of different things, of course, like if they get the funding and a lot of other things.”