By Liz Holland

SALISBURY — The Wicomico County Council agreed on Tuesday to execute a recorded mortgage – one of many conditions attached to a $5.5 million federal grant to pay for improvements to the Wicomico Civic Center.

Certain conditions came with the grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration which have been worked out over many months by lawyers on both sides, said Steve Miller, the county’s Director of Director of Recreation, Parks and Tourism.

The recorded mortgage protects the federal interest in the property over the next 15 years, he said.

Council officials announced in June 2022 that the money through the American Rescue Plan had been approved and would be combined with $1.4 million in state and local funds to make major upgrades to the 45-year-old facility.

John Psota, who was acting Wicomico County Executive at the time of the announcement, called the $6.9 million “the single largest investment in this building in over 40 years.”

Plans designed by the Becker Morgan Group, a Salisbury-based architectural and engineering firm, include an expanded box office and lobby, safety barriers along the north and west sides of the building, improved wayfinding, improved Americans with Disabilities Act access to the building, an expanded food court and better connectivity between the Civic Center and the Wicomico High School campus.

The county has all of the funding in hand and is currently nearing the end of the design phase of the project, Miller said. Bids are expected to be sought this spring, with work starting as early as fall.

The county had plans to renovate the building for several years, but until it received the federal grant it lacked the funding to complete all of the work.

In 2016, the county invested $7 million to replace the old lime green seats and bright blue doors left over from the building’s construction in 1979. New seating upholstered in charcoal was installed and tile floors were replaced with carpeting.

The renovations also included the installation of lower-tier seats in the Normandy Arena that can be retracted electronically. Previously, it took six civic center staff members an entire day to pull out or retract seats on the lower level manually. Now it takes two people a couple of hours to do the same job.

At the time, the work was the first major rehabilitation of the facility since it was built in 1979 to replace a building that was destroyed by fire in 1977.

The same year that the seating was replaced, the civic center won the ability to dispense beer, wine and liquor at concerts, sports events and private parties for the first time in its history.
For years, there was a commonly held belief that the county could not sell or distribute alcohol on the property because it was a condition set by the late S. Franklyn Woodcock and his wife Elizabeth when they donated 39 acres to the county for the facility and a veterans war memorial in 1946.

But deed research showed the Woodcocks had released any rights they had in the property when the land was conveyed in 1959 to the Wicomico County War Memorial Builders Inc., an entity established to raise money for a civic center.

But in 1971, when the Wicomico County War Memorial Builders conveyed the property back to the county, it was without an alcohol covenant.

After the deed research concluded the civic center could have been selling alcohol all along, it was finally awarded a liquor license in 2016.