Thursday prior to the council meeting I sat down with the Mayor and Service Director to discuss the hot topics of the current downtown project and plans along with the maintenance of our current parks. My first question was to understand what happened with all the other previous ideas of downtown (retail/restaurants, rec center), and how we got to the amphitheater idea.
- The initial plan to work with a developer did not happen because the mix of residential and potential retail/restaurant space the city would get was not a mix the city was happy with.
- The next concept of a rec center really never got off the ground. It wasn’t a concept that came from the city but someone looking for land in the city that was going to create a training center that could be “expanded” into a rec center type facility. It would have remained privately owned and required membership that would potentially be discounted for residents. This plan required more land, and when the land wasn’t acquired no more details were looked at for this plan as the developers were already considering another site.
- Currently, the proposal discussed was an amphitheater, which really isn’t a “new” idea but a revival of an old idea that was proposed in the early 200o’s with drawings from 2006. My question was, what type of events are you planning for this area? If you don’t have a good idea of the programming that is going to take place in a facility like this, then I am not sure it is a good use of the land for something to go unused. The ideas that were shared for use in this area were movie nights, performances by our local choir and bands, magic shows, yoga, and maybe a food truck event.
My position is that re-building a park and updating the green space this area could easily provide for all the types of events listed above and maybe after a few years of looking at the events, turn out and use of the space, then you could really evaluate if an amphitheater would be a value add, but as of right now I do not see it as a need for the events they want to have. Overall, I think this is the direction the administration is planning on and for now have put the amphitheater concept “on hold”.
I also inquired about the current state of the parks maintenance as there are several parks issues that have been brought to me by residents in my tenure on Council. I saw a lot of these items and issues also on occurring while I was on the Parks Board where issues were known but there was not always staff available to address them. The city, as a whole, streamlined many operations during cut backs during the recession, there were many ongoing maintenance issues that suffered during that time, roads maintenance, stormwater maintenance, and lastly the parks maintenance. In the past several years the first two issues have been addressed by increasing the roads maintenance budget, adding a stormwater tax to increase those projects, now is the time to address the needs of parks maintenance. It seems to be a focus of this administration to address the ongoing parks maintenance issues and just about a month ago city council approved a staffing switch which should help with the parks projects on the agenda. The staffing switch was replacing a prior higher level equipment operator position with two entry level laborer potions. There have been some parks projects done this year so far, including some updates at the red park. I hope that these labor changes and some other administration ideas will continue and that we will continue to see the parks getting the maintenance and updates needed. I feel the key to these kinds of projects is for ongoing updates and communication with our residents so they are aware of the projects that are being worked on so they understand what is being accomplished.
I will continue to follow up on the parks maintenance issues to make sure they remain a priority and continue to push for communication about such projects to provide transparency to the residents. As a member of the new SKiP committee I will continue to provide updates to the project so that the confusion that ensued at the beginning of this project will not occur again.