At 4 p.m. last Friday, a ribbon came down in front of a 107,000-square-foot building at 2836 Recreation Way, and the doors opened to a crowd that had, in some form, been waiting since 1978. That's the year Grand Junction Parks and Recreation Director Ken Sherbenou pointed to when he described the first serious attempt to build a public recreation center for this city. It took another four and a half decades, a 2023 ballot measure, and a 0.14% sales tax increase before the Community Recreation Center actually existed. By Saturday afternoon, pool access had to be split into two-hour sessions just to manage the crowd.
If you live in North Grand Junction, you already know the building is there. What's less obvious, unless you've been following the parks department's public meetings, is that the CRC is only the finished half of what this particular piece of land was supposed to become. The other half is still an open question the city is actively deciding this year, and it involves the same 205 acres the rec center now sits beside.
What Actually Opened Last Week
The Community Recreation Center cost $82.1 million to build, well above its original scope. The project started as an 83,000-square-foot facility and grew to 107,000 square feet after St. Mary's Intermountain Health and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs added funding partway through design. Barker Rinker Seacat led that design work alongside Chamberlin Architecture, with FCI serving as construction manager.
Inside, the building splits roughly into two halves: an aquatics side and a fitness side. The aquatics half holds five pools, branded as the St. Mary's Pools, with two water slides, a lazy river, a diving board, jumping platforms, and a climbing wall built into the pool itself. The fitness half has a three-court gymnasium, an indoor track, a full climbing wall, group fitness rooms, a synthetic turf field, a Kids Club, and community rooms available for rental. An Intermountain Health clinic operates out of the same building, branded as the Matchett Park Clinic.
Pricing breaks out by residency. As of the September 25 opening, annual memberships paid monthly run $42 a month for adult Grand Junction residents, $57 a month for other Mesa County residents, and $72 a month for visitors from outside the county, with discounted rates for seniors and children and bundled family options. Day passes for city residents are cheaper still: $9 for adults, $7 for seniors, $6 for youth, with Mesa County residents and outside visitors paying more. A 20-punch pass is also available for people who want to try it out before committing to a membership.
The demand showed up before the building even opened. More than 1,000 annual memberships sold in the first week sales went live back in June, and staff walked more than 4,000 people through guided tours in the weeks leading up to the ribbon cutting, according to City Manager Mike Bennett. Sherbenou has said he expects the facility to average around 1,100 visitors a day once it settles into a normal schedule, drawing not just from the immediate neighborhood but from Mesa County residents willing to make the drive, and from families who'd otherwise head to Denver or Salt Lake City for the same amenities.
The Land Underneath It
The CRC sits on part of Matchett Park, a 205-acre city-owned property at Patterson Road and 28¼ Road that Grand Junction acquired back in 1996 and left largely undeveloped for the next two decades. A farm lease kept most of the acreage in agricultural use, with informal farm roads doing double duty as walking, running, and biking paths for anyone who wanted to use them.
The city's 2014 Matchett Park Master Plan is the document that set the current moment in motion. It called for exactly the kind of major recreation investment that just opened, and it also called for a second, smaller piece: a formal bike park on the east side of the property, complete with dedicated parking and a built-out trail system. The plan existed because the surrounding neighborhood needed it. According to the city's own facility records, the dense neighborhoods around Matchett Park had only 7.8 acres of park space that residents could reach without crossing Patterson Road or traveling well east or west. Demand on the existing parks wasn't holding steady either. Multipurpose field rentals across the city's parks system climbed 130% between 2006 and the plan's adoption, and shelter rentals climbed 123% over the same stretch.
The rec center answered one half of that 2014 plan. The bike park half never got built the way the master plan described it. What did happen, informally, is that mountain bikers started building jump lines and features on the east side of the property on their own, without city sanction. A sign near those features today warns riders that the area isn't an approved city bike park.
The Question the City Hasn't Answered Yet
This spring, the city opened a public survey asking Grand Junction residents what should happen to that unsanctioned bike park. Sherbenou has said the earlier conflicts between mountain bikers and other users of that side of the park, particularly disc golfers, have already been worked out. What's left to settle is who manages the space going forward.
The model on the table mirrors an arrangement the city already has running successfully across town. The Lunch Loop Bike Park operates under a lease between the city and the Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association, known locally as COPMOBA, a nonprofit that took on fundraising, construction, and ongoing maintenance after the city handed over the land. That lease was recently renewed, and COPMOBA is currently using it as the foundation for a renovation of the Lunch Loop park itself. Sherbenou has pointed to that success directly as a reason the city is comfortable discussing a similar handoff at Matchett Park, and city engagement materials confirm COPMOBA is the nonprofit already in conversation about the option.
Nothing is finalized. The survey results still need to feed into a public meeting where the city plans to share what residents said and gather more feedback before deciding a direction. But the shape of the decision is visible enough that anyone who bikes, walks, or lets a dog off leash on that side of Matchett Park now has an actual answer to why the trails still look unofficial, and a real timeline for when that might change.
What This Means for the Corner of Patterson and 28¼
For the last two years, this stretch of North Grand Junction has been a construction zone building toward something. That phase is over for the recreation center. Regular operating hours started Monday, September 28, at 5:30 a.m., and the building is open for its ordinary daily use now rather than a special event.
The land next to it hasn't finished changing. The Matchett Park Bike Park decision is likely to play out over the next several months, following the same public-meeting-then-decision process the parks department used for the rec center itself, just on a much smaller scale. If the COPMOBA arrangement goes forward, expect the same pattern that transformed Lunch Loop: a nonprofit takes over what the city already has on the ground, formalizes it, and starts fundraising for improvements.
Anyone whose daily walk, ride, or school run passes through this corner of the neighborhood now has two threads to follow instead of one. The building is finished. The trail system next to it is still being written.
Want to know what a fast-changing corner of North Grand Junction means for your own plans in the neighborhood? The Van Gundy Group knows this stretch of Patterson Road as well as anyone in town. Contact Us.
