Every four years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provides grants to local governments for improvements aimed at enhancement of low-income areas through the Community Development Block Grant Program, which is then administered through state organizations including the Northern Arizona Council of Governments.
In January of 2019, the Cottonwood City Council voted to apply to use $330,143 of CDBG funding on improvements on parks throughout the city.
At a meeting on March 2, the Cottonwood City Council unanimously approved the use of these funds to build a playground structure in the Cottonwood Kids Park as part of the consent agenda. No discussion about this allocation was made, even though it was a change from the original CDBG park plans.
At the time, the city focused on three intended projects that they hoped to use the money on — a parks master plan that would guide the city in the coming years, improving park signage and wayfinding throughout the city, and using water from the water reclamation plant to improve the grass in Riverfront Park.
The city approved a master plan in September, but the other two projects, which
would have constituted the bulk of the grant funding, ended up being incompatible with the requirements of the federal grant, leading to the shift in funding.
“As we really started to get into this project, neither of those are really feasible under this grant,” Cottonwood Parks and Recreation Manager Jak Teel said.
According to Teel, the Riverfront Park project would not be able to be finished by the grant deadline of a year from now [after a six-month extension]. Meanwhile, HUD requires that funding be used to help low-income residents, and while parks fit that requirement, HUD determined that signage would be mostly used by tourists and not by the city’s low-income residents.
“We started identifying other projects through the Parks and Rec master plan,” Teel said. In developing the master plan, the city had asked for public input on which projects people wanted completed. After consulting that input, Parks and Recreation found that a playground structure at the Cottonwood Kids Park and improvements to Garrison Park were the two leaders that could be completed for the roughly $300,000 that the town has left.
“You have to have a completed project by the end of it. You can’t use it to fund a portion of the project,” Teel said. “We identified ones the community voted on. They wanted to see a playground structure [at Cottonwood Kids Park]. The remains will go to updating and refreshing some of the amenities at Garrison Park. Those were both projects identified by the community through the Parks and Recreation master plan that fit the criterion of the grant.”
According to Teel, the plan is to build the playground and then to use whatever funding remains to improve Garrison Park in small ways, such as improving the basketball court with a new hoop and other features, and adding picnic tables.
As for the playground project, Parks and Rec is working with contractors to develop four designs for the new playground, which will then be opened up for public input before deciding on a choice and beginning construction. Teel does not have a fixed timeline yet, but the federal funds must be utilized on a completed project within the next year.
Teel stresses that designs will be up to the public, but also expressed his own desires for a new playground.
“One of the things I am big on in Parks and Recreation is creative play — getting kids to exercise and not realizing it’s exercise because they’re caught up in the play of it,” Teel said.
“We’re looking at movement on the structures, not just standing still. I want kids interacting and I don’t want dead space on the equipment…. I want every part of our play structure to be usable and playable.”
