Parks board looks at ways to adapt projects

By Ralph Pokorny

Nevada Daily Mail

Nevada voters approved renewing the city's 1/2-cent parks and recreation sales tax in April 2005 for nine years, with the promise to either renovate or rebuild the community center, install new lights and improve parking at Lyons Stadium and Bushwhacker Field, make improvements at Earp Park, build paved biking and hiking trails and make improvements at the Twin Lakes complex.

Last spring the city installed the new lights at Lyons Stadium and Bushwhacker Fields, but the rest of the program has been on hold for the last six months.

The problem is that the tax will not generate enough money over its nine-year life to complete all of the projects on the ballot.

Harlan Moore, interim city manager told the parks board several months ago that he realized when he first looked at the sales tax projects that there was a problem. The tax would not generate enough money to do all of the projects promised, a fact echoed by Jim Adams, the consultant hired by the city to develop, in conjunction with Bucher Willis & Ratliff, a company that specializes in developing recreation facilities, a parks master plan.

During a special parks board meeting Tuesday night, Moore told an impatient parks board that he had put the projects on hold until the parks board could look at the projects and re-define the scope of the projects to fit the available money.

To help put the projects back on track the park board voted Tuesday to have Moore discuss the scope of the projects with Jim Adams and also appointed a subcommittee of Nora Quitno, Jeff Post and Gina Cripps to work on a proposed agreement.

"I'll do whatever I can to get this moving," Quitno said.

"We all agree that the civic center is the number one priority, but that cannot be done for a while," Post said. "In the meantime I would like to get permission from the city council to develop some baseball and fast pitch fields at Twin Lakes."

"I'd like to get some ball fields done by spring or early summer," he said.

Post came to a Nov. 2 special parks board meeting armed with a scale drawing of a proposed baseball complex at Twin Lakes.

When the ground is frozen is a good time to layout the fields, he said Wednesday night.

Since the fields at Twin Lakes will be primarily for tournaments and league play, they will not be open for general use and the city needs to look at building some other fields for pick-up games and practice fields, Post said.

Currently there are no fast pitch softball fields in Nevada and all of the baseball fields are privately owned or operated.

"We also need some more slow-pitch softball fields," Jim Novak said. "The current fields at Twin Lakes are used to capacity and the older girls have to go to El Dorado Springs to play."

The city's five-year capital improvement budget that the planning commission looked at during their monthly meeting Tuesday night included the $700,000 of estimated park sales tax collection and mentioned building new ball fields at Twin Lakes Park in 2007.

"We also need soccer fields and football fields," he said.

Although the youth sports facilities are key issues with several of the parks board members, Quitno reminded the board that the golfers who use the Frank E. Peters Municipal Golf Course were an important group that helped to renew the tax.

"We need to look at the golf course. Maybe we should focus on the Twin Lakes complex," Quitno said.

Post suggested that they should tackle Twin Lakes in two parts, with the youth sports facilities first and the golf course second.

Novak said that he is against spending much money on the golf course as long as it is losing money each year.

Moore told the board that they estimate the golf course will lose about $80,000 in 2006.

"Anything you do there needs to be comprehensive. You need to look at the entire facility," Adams said.

Mark Mitchell, the city's project manager, told the parks board that the city is currently working on a grant application with the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency for a $3 million matching grant to build a community shelter.

The grant is being used in many communities to build gymnasiums and if the city gets the grant, which must be submitted by the end of December, the plan is to use that as part of a new civic center to extend the money available from the sales tax.

Mitchell told the board that the city has a group of 11 people working on assembling the needed information to complete the grant application, which is 37 pages long.

One of the requirements they are working on fulfilling is determining how many people are within a five minute drive of the current Public Safety building, which is a proposed location for a combined facility to serve as a civic center as well as provide space for the police department and the city administration.

Mitchell said the application requires that they determine that number for each hour of the day.