Voters pick amenities for proposed city park
The community has spoken and an outdoor amphitheater, baseball/softball fields and splashpads seem the top priorities for a proposed city park south of Walmart.
Although Vireo Landscape will make an official report publicly available within the next few weeks, unofficial data gathered by the Cameron Citizen-Observer at the event seems to indicate Cameron citizens favor construction of an outdoor amphitheater (16 votes), baseball/softball fields (14), soccer fields (9), restrooms (7) and splashpads (6) for a proposed 67-acre park south of Walmart.
“It went really well. I was pleased with the turnout. The community was there, but we wish we would have had a larger turnout … You always wish you had more,” Cameron Public Works Director Drew Bontrager said.
With the new information, associates with Vireo will next tailor a plan for the proposed park in order to present it before the Cameron Parks Board, which would then go before the city council for final approval. The city plans to use $450,000 from the sale of the Park Valley Baseball/Softball Complex – the home of the Cameron High School baseball and softball teams – as a down-payment for the park. With plans to renovate the Cameron Municipal Pool also in the works, Bontrager said the city will eventually seek a sales tax increase to fund both the new park and pool renovation, but could not speculate how much that sales tax increase would be until he receives a final report from Vireo outlining the costs.
“We have numbers from 2017, when we did the master plan, but we have no definitive numbers at this point. The park board, since there is not enough money generated annually to fund this type of project, would need some kind of funding mechanism for it,” Bontrager said. “Once we nail down exactly what those different features and amenities are in this park and how they fit with the grading, bathrooms, sewers and water. At that point, we develop a construction estimate to tell us how much it will cost and then we can develop a funding mechanism. It’s all one. It would be the for pool and the community park.”
