Funding approved for Maitland park makeovers

A bid to classify Maitland’s old city hall site as an official park may have stalled on Monday night, but three of the city’s other parks got the go-ahead for major makeovers thanks to funding approved by the Maitland City Council over the past month.

The Maitland Middle School Athletic Field, Kings Row Park and Jim Houser Azalea Gardens/Covered Bridge Park will each see improvements thanks to roughly $450,000 of funding approved by the City Council since February.

“We’re going into a lot of really cool enhancements for our parks,” said Mari Smith, the city’s community events coordinator. “It’s an exciting time.”

The grass will soon be greener over at Kings Row Park, as funding was approved to re-sod its soccer field at the March 23 Council meeting. New grass is just a small portion of a bigger improvement project at the park, which was approved by Council in February, that will add new landscaping, walking paths, lighting, benches and parking.

“It’ll be a beautiful park with the upgrades; it will really enhance that community,” Smith said.

The Maitland Middle fields will also see substantial reconfigurations as two of its four baseball fields are set to be sodded over to increase playing field space for soccer, football and lacrosse.

In February, the Maitland City Council approved plans to rebuild the Old Horatio Bridge Cover, which tumbled down in 2013 after an oversized truck attempted to drive under it. And now the park that stands in its name, Covered Bridge Park, is getting a renovation of its own. Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city is adding two new picnic shelters, seven new tables, two reconfigured parking spaces, and rubberized trails to Covered Bridge Park.

Smith said grant money will also fund the installation of educational signs at the park, teaching visitors about Maitland’s wildlife around them.

“It really takes the environment and turns it into a learning lab,” Smith said. “… Parks are places where not only can kids go play on a playground, but can see and learn about the wonderful wildlife around them.”

This month, the Maitland Leisure Services Department also kicked off its campaign to overhaul the city’s Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Smith said the city will be looking for Maitland citizens to come out and speak up about what they want the city’s parks to be in the future to help form the new master plan.

“We want to bring people together to find out what the community needs when it comes to parks,” Smith said. “… We’re focusing on the future of parks, and what the residents want our parks to be.”

One area that won’t be included in the parks’ master plan just yet is the land once home to Maitland’s old city hall building. Though the Maitland City Council agreed with many of the city’s residents earlier this year who pushed to make the site a park instead of selling it to developers, the Council decided Monday to put off designating the lot as “Parks and Recreation.”

The Council agreed that it’s premature to change the designation, as there’s still no clear plan as to what development will go up downtown around it. And, as City Attorney Cliff Shepard pointed out, if the land designation changes to Parks and Recreation now, in order to make any changes to the configuration of the property it later would have to be approved by a voters referendum.

Councilwoman Bev Reponen said the designating the land as a park is an important step that needs to be taken, but not before the other details of downtown are sorted out. For example, she said, if the building of Quiet Zones requires edging out a corner of the park or if a pedestrian bridge is wanted to get people across Horatio Avenue and requires a few feet of parkland to be built upon, it’ll be a lot easier to give up those small pieces of land without having to go to a referendum to do so.

The Council voted unanimously to bring the decision of designating the old city hall site back to the dais within the next six months, once more plans for the downtown district are fleshed out.

“I want to make sure that we really look at this, and when the time comes we can have a beautiful park there,” said Mayor Howard Schieferdecker, “but I want to make sure the rest of the pieces are in place first.”