Public input sought on Park Plan

“We’ve gone ahead and done a demographic assessment to talk about where you’ve been and where you’re going. We’ve used that information to overlay some participation statistics so we can have a good idea of what participation might be like in various activities that could take place in your park,” said Barr. 

He added that if the board has no interest in particular items, that’s okay - but consideration must be taken on where people are going to do activities that are left out of the plan. 

To better adhere to the citizen’s wants and needs, the city uploaded a survey to its website for public input. Barr says they have received around 150 responses so far. 

“The information has been interesting because in some instances you’ll get a divergence from what you hear online and maybe what you hear in person,” Barr said. “But based on what we’ve heard today - which is a small sample, but still a sample - it’s very consistent.” 

Barr said one thing he found interesting was that many responses want one of the parks or a part of the parks to be more family-oriented. Several expressed interest in the addition of a dog park to provide a safe place for family pets. Some also requested drop-in activities as opposed to league play, allowing families to play without signing up or joining a league. 

Responses also included items such as restrooms and infrastructure upgrades. 

The survey is available until Sept. 9. 

“At that point, we’ll go ahead and pull that [the survey] down, we’ll take all that information and start to synthesize that into some recommendations that we’ll go ahead and share with your staff,” Barr said. “Then we can take that information and give it to Cochran, and Cochran can go ahead and start talking about what that might look like, what that might feel like and what a timeline for some of those implementation things might be.” 

Simultaneously, Ballard*King & Associates will be looking at the operations of the parks.

“You run a very lean and mean park system - which is to say that your staff that is dedicated to parks does a lot,” Barr said. “So we want to make sure whatever kind of recommendations we’re looking at - and whatever kind of implementation time frame that might be over a five- 10-year period - that you have the staff that’s appropriate to go ahead and deal with those facilities that you’re going to be implementing.” 

When asked for comments, Alderman Kevin Rucker mentioned a group that previously put together a plan for a frisbee golf course that was never implemented. He added that they could partner with them again if a disc golf course was of any interest. 

“When we put this master plan together we don’t go ahead and we don’t say,’ this is what you have to do.’ We want the master plan to be reflective of the data we collect at the time and we want it to be reflective of the citizenry at the time,” said Barr. “The reality is you’re not going to be able to do all of it at the same time and there are certain things that are going to have to come before one another, but we want to write this in a way that you can pivot as you’re going through the process and still have options depending upon the direction that you’re going.”