After years of preparation, including planning, allocating funds and dealing with lawsuits from neighboring residents, construction has begun in earnest on the Camp Verde Sports Complex.
The $7 million project on the 110- acre parcel of land by State Route 260 and McCracken Lane is still in its early stages, but town officials expressed positive feelings about the progress so far.
“What we’ve done so far is we’ve designed all of the grading and infrastructure that has to be done on a raw piece of property that has to be done before you can build something like a park on it,” said Camp Verde Director of Public Works Ron Long. “You want it to drain properly, and you need to have all your utilities, all your underground utilities, for your bathrooms and for your irrigation on the fields, and your lighting and all that stuff needs to be in the ground ideally before you start building fields, or you’ll be tearing your fields back up trying to run power and water and all that to them. So what we’ve been working on is getting that grading set. We have done some utilities, but we’re just barely getting started on those. We’re wrapping up the grading right now.”
Long said more than 290,000 cubic yards of dirt had to be moved on site. Of that, about 240,000 cubic yards were already on the site, with an additional 50,000 having to be brought in.
Much of the dirt brought for the park comes from the 10 million gallon reservoir being built up the hill from the park complex, which would hopefully be able to handle two to three weeks of field irrigation during dry months.
“Any money we can save in the front end, we can use for the things people really want to see — the ball fields and tennis courts and such,” Long said.
The water for the reservoir and irrigation will come from the nearby wastewater treatment plant, reusing water reclaimed at the plant. According to Long, the water will be Class A Plus reclaimed water, which means it is good for irrigation, even if it should not be used for drinking water.
“When you’ve invested this much money in ballfields, you want to make sure you don’t run out of water to irrigate the fields,” Long said.
The park construction has not been without issues. On July 26, a heavy monsoon storm hit in the afternoon and made a mess of some of the site. A straw wattle that was set up to keep dirt in place got stuck in the piping in the drainage channel, causing the ditch to overflow and cover McCracken Lane with mud, angering some residents.
“It came across the side of that ditch so hard it washed the straw bales down the side of the hill and across the road,” said Cheri Wischmeyer, who lives adjacent to the park. Wischmeyer complained that though the town had cleaned up the road from the resulting mud, much of the area has been left in the state it was after the storm.
Carol German, another resident of McCracken Lane adjacent to the construction site, lodged a formal complaint with the town on Aug. 15, alleging that her property was damaged in the storm and blaming the town for not properly protecting her property from the water.
“Something needs to be done immediately before further damage is done to mine and other residential properties,” German wrote in her complaint.
Town Manager Russ Martin said the vegetation that will hopefully prevent such damage in the future is not yet stable enough to keep the water from overflowing, but said along with Long that the final construction will not cause any of these problems. Martin said he hopes with the monsoon ending soon, construction should be able to progress past that and overcome such hurdles.
“The contractor has been good about going forward and being flexible with the needs of the neighborhood and with us,” Martin said.
The grading phase, including water, sewer and electrical infrastructure, is expected to be finished by early September. This would then lead to a new round of contractor bids for the following phase of the park. Construction of the ball fields would be expected to begin in the early part of 2019 and take about three months, though it would likely take until the end of the summer for the park to be fully operational, waiting for the grass and other plant life to fully take hold in the soil before allowing people to use the fields. Town officials said they plan to open whatever parts they can, such as the trail around the park and tennis courts, before the grass is finished.
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
