“Think back to when you were a child and your memories that impacted you,” Hezekiah Allen, interim manager for the Cottonwood Recreation Center, said. “I would imagine that a lot of them happened in a park.”
Allen stood in front of the Cottonwood City Council at a meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 19, and made the case for a new master plan for a redesign of Riverfront Park. The redesign was paid for by a grant from Arizona State Parks of about $107,000, which was used for a master plan for the whole set of parks around town. Parks and Recreation hired Norris Design to design Riverfront Park.
The Parks and Recreation department has been working on this process for a year and has sought to bring in public involvement and input with the project. Norris Design held four public meetings to discuss residents’ desires in a park redesign starting August of 2018 and solicited input through a poll.
In the outreach meetings, members of the public were invited to signal with stickers which of a collection of more than 40 potential features of the park they were most interested in. The top 12 choices among poll participants were: A splash pad, walking and jogging trails, roller skating and hockey, disc golf, multi-use green areas, soccer fields, a children’s bike track, workout stations, sand volleyball, organized softball, an expanded dog park and pickleball courts.
All of the top 12 choices can be found in the master plan. According to Brian Sager of Norris Design, the park is designed to take advantage of the Verde River and also take account of the flood plain.
In addition, the master plan maintains much of the already existing aspects of the park, such as the ball fields and the community gardens. Sager also pointed to an extended roadway that would circle all the way around the ball field in the interest of public safety and the ability to patrol more areas of the park more easily.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the council unanimously voted to approve the plan, with caveats about certain parts of it.
Councilman Michael Mathews praised the plan but expressed reservations about a proposed learning center in the park, which he worried might not be used much and therefore a waste of money.
“When there’s a learning center we just built on to a sewer plant recently and sits there unused most of the time, I just don’t see a need for that,” Mathews said. “I feel very strongly about that.”
“There are parts of this that I’m really excited about,” Mayor Tim Elinski said. “There are parts I think that could be improved. As we work holistically on all the other parks and how everything kind of ties in together, this design may get changed, and depending on funding availability it may also change as well, but I think it’s an excellent vision guide for us moving forward.”
City Manager Ron Corbin told the council that while this is a start of the process, the city has not budgeted any funding to improve the park for the next year and that how much of this park gets built will depend on financial concerns in the future.
“You can’t get from A to Z without a road map,” Councilman Mathews said.
“And money,” Vice Mayor Tosca Henry said.
