Meeting will help decide Monessen rec board’s fate

By KRISTIE LINDEN

klinden@yourmvi.com

Members of Monessen’s city council and recreation board will meet at 2 p.m. today to try to hammer out the ongoing issues between the two factions.

Mayor Matt Shorraw said there isn’t a set agenda exactly, but he set forth guidelines in the meeting’s advertisement. It states the meeting is meant to discuss the interpersonal issues among recreation board members, the city’s expectations for the board and the board’s plans for programming in the city moving forward.

Shorraw has said that if the issues can’t be worked out and if the drama involved on the board doesn’t stop, he will consider making a motion at the next council meeting, set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, to dissolve the board.

This wouldn’t be the first time the board has been dissolved — it wouldn’t even be the second time. The city first had a Civic Center Authority, which was founded in the 1960s specifically to run the Civic Center on Donner Avenue.

A recreation board came about a decade later in the ’70s, Shorraw said, and was eventually dissolved at some point. It was brought back in the 1990s and the Civic Center Authority was merged with the recreation board to create one City of Monessen Recreation Authority.

That authority was dissolved in April 2010, due largely in part to personality clashes it seems.

The authority was brought back four years later. While it was dissolved, though, Monessen Communities that Care, a nonprofit organized by Teresa Seh, managed the Civic Center on behalf of the city. The group kept programming running in the building while there was no recreation authority.

The authority was reorganized in 2014, but it was dissolved again and then brought back yet again — not as an authority but as a board — by ordinance in 2018, Shorraw said.

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