MoBand, city aim to improve Mancini Bowl seating

MoBand is working with the city of Modesto to improve the seating at Graceada Park’s Mancini Bowl, where the band performs its hugely popular series of free concerts each summer.

The stadium seating at the bowl is divided into five sections. The two outside sections are bench seating made of heavy-gauge aluminum, while the center three are individual seats. Over the decades, vandalism and normal breakage have resulted in removal of dozens of the individual seats. A few entire rows are missing.

“It’s horrible,” MoBand board Vice President and Secretary Steven Perry said of the condition of the seats, which he believes date back to the 1960s. Of the amphitheater’s 1,200-person capacity, about 440 is bench seating. Of the remaining 760 individual seats, about 190 are missing, Perry said.

For four years, the band and the city have presented the wine-, beer- and food-tasting fundraiser Night at the Bowl. That and other fundraising have generated about $50,000. Half of that has gone to MoBand and half to a Stanislaus Community Foundation account on behalf of the city toward improving the bowl’s seating area.

“Really, the idea is we would renovate all of the seating area to make it complete and (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant,” said Loren Holt, the city’s manager of parks planning and development. The individual seating would be replaced by metal or concrete benches, he said, and some of the pathway to disabled seating in front would have its grade reduced and possibly be widened.

Among consent items on the agenda for its Tuesday night meeting, the Modesto City Council will consider approving the renovation and confirming it as a Park Partners Program project. Created in 2000, Park Partners lets projects that use donated funds and labor skip the public-bidding process.

There is not yet an overall construction budget figure, Holt said, but an architect is working on plans.

“We need to determine more specifically what needs to be done, what the costs are and what can be donated,” he said.

MoBand has been “tossing around” the idea of the seating renovation since 2008, Perry said.

“We realized the parks department was deep in a tailspin in budgetary terms,” he said, “and that as longtime residents within the park, we needed to get out and work with them.”

While many groups use the Mancini Bowl during the year, MoBand has a sense of pride of ownership because it performs a six-concert series each summer that packs the immediate seating area and draws a crowd that pours over to blanket seating all around the amphitheater. And because the band performs so often and has for so many years, its members and supporters have keenly observed the deterioration of the seating, Perry said.

Perry is enthusiastic about going to all bench seating.

“Their selling factor is that a giant branch broke off a pine tree and fell across benches on the left side and they really withstood the weight and impact,” Perry said. “So we’re hoping that in changing the seating, that gives the park a really long-term solution that is really easy to maintain.”

Replacing individual seats with benches also will increase the venue’s capacity a bit when removal of armrest space is considered, he said.

This story was originally published August 31, 2015 at 3:18 PM with the headline "MoBand, city aim to improve Mancini Bowl seating."