After battling the county, Beaufort’s Charles Lind Brown Center gets $520K overhaul at last

Mitch Mitchell is one very persistent guy.

The Charles Lind Brown Center, a Beaufort County-run recreation facility in the heart of a downtown Beaufort neighborhood, is a place where generations of local kids went after school to study or play basketball. But while popular recreation centers like Buckwalter in Bluffton and Burton Wells thrived, the Beaufort center languished in recent years without funding or much attention. For a while, the center wasn’t even accessible to residents for meetings and recreation because the county was renting it to a private school.

After he joined the Beaufort City Council in 2021, Mitchell, a retired U.S. Air Force major general, saw that lack of investment in the building and programs in Beaufort as a slap in the face to the residents that the venerable facility was supposed to serve. And he started asking questions. Other residents, it turns out, had similar concerns about its condition and programming. Those residents, along with Mitchell, formed a committee called Friends of the Charles Lind Brown Community Center to lobby a reluctant Beaufort County to increase funding and improve programming at the facility known locally as the Greene Street Gym.

On Saturday, the city will celebrate $520,000 in improvements that have been completed since 2021 at a public open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The pressure on the county from Mitchell and other committee members formed to bring public opinion to bear on the issue — and a change in county leadership — is being credited for the long overdue upgrades.

“It’s beautiful,” Mitchell, who was often the public face of the committee, says of the Charles Lind Brown Center following the improvements.

The place has been overhauled.

New luxury vinyl tile flooring has been installed throughout the building, while an old workout room has been re-purposed as a yoga studio. The basketball/pickleball court has been repainted. And a new weightlifting room with state-of-the-art equipment and rubberized flooring has been added. Two kitchens have been renovated, and there’s new classrooms and a new game room.

That’s just the inside.

Outside, there’s a new heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Fencing has been added for security around the playground, which features new equipment. The leaky roof was repaired.

It wasn’t easy. Mitchell butted heads with former Beaufort County Administrator Eric Greenway after he started asking questions.

“He really didn’t have any answers and really didn’t, in my opinion, care too much about it,” Mitchell told the Beaufort and Island Packet Thursday, adding that it “was a very steep hill to climb to try to get the county off the dime to do anything.”

The Friends of the Charles Lind Brown Community Center convened in 2021 to make the case for substantial improvements to the rec center.

With support from the neighborhood association leaders such as Dan Blackman and Peggy Simmer, the five core committee members — Mitchell, Alana Jenkins, Ed Allen, Christopher Thompson, the Rev. Theresa Roberts and Sam Burke — went to work. Their vision was an accessible center that offered programs that appealed to residents of all ages, from youth to seniors.

They came up with a survey and walked every street in the area to hand it out. They used that data to show the county what the people wanted. A community meeting that was held after that survey drew 500 people. Many registered their dissatisfaction with the county that it was not providing the same level of service at Charles Lind Brown that it was for Buckwalter and Burton Wells.

Still, that information, Mitchell said, was not initially well received.

“I will tell you for a fact he (Greenway) was just not motivated to do anything there,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell really got steamed when the county began offering summer camp exclusively to its employees at the Charles Lind Brown Center and tried to disguise the effort. Besides being unfair, he said at the time, it also further limited access to the facility by the neighborhood.

At the time, committee members were told, the largest room at the center, outside of the basketball court, was being used for storage for Shannon Loper, the county’s former parks and recreation director.

As taxpayers, committee members also wanted to know where the money collected for leasing the facility to the private school went. “It didn’t go to the Charles Lind Brown Center,” Mitchell said.

Then committee members heard of the county’s effort to improve recreational facilities countywide. They went to work to influence that process and get a fair share of funding for the Charles Lind Brown Center.

Meanwhile, in July, Greenway was fired for alleged misconduct. The reasons have not been fully disclosed. Loper is gone, too.

Neither of those developments were specifically tied to the uphill slog Beaufort residents faced in pushing for improvements at the Charles Lind Brown Center. But, says Mitchell, the change in county leadership has been like “a breath of fresh air” bringing a new perspective about the importance of having a recreational facility located close to the people it was originally designed to serve.

Greenway’s replacement, acting County Administrator John Robinson, Mitchell said, “immediately saw that things needed to be done.” Mitchell also credits Hank Amundson, Robinson’s special assistant, and Eric Larson, the county’s capital Improvement projects director with the improvements at the community center.

“It’s almost a 180-degree turn, in a good way, from what it was in 2021-2022,” Mitchell said of the county’s attitude toward the local center.

Mitchell sees better days ahead for the center at 1001 Hamar St. and for the relationship between the city and county.

Ongoing projects include gym bathroom renovations, new scoreboards, a new gym floor, painting the exterior facade and replacement of the playground slides.

At the open house, residents will see the improvements for themselves and also hear from county staff on the programs that are now available. They can sign up for programs if they want.

Open house

An open house to showcase the improvements at the Charles Lind Brown Center 1001 Hamar St. will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, March 16. The public is invited.