Recent stories in the news: “New Environmental Playground Ground-breaking,” “Newly resurfaced Tennis Courts”…both are good for our community.
Work is already underway on the new Environmental/Natural Playground at America the Beautiful Park, and it should be completed by the end of the year. The Creekside development will connect residents and visitors to Fountain Creek and turn the stream into a community asset. There will be a small beach, features for kids to climb on plus an educational component teaching the story of floods and storm-water. This type of amenity has proved to be immensely popular in other Front Range communities. Check out the activity in Clear Creek in Golden or Cherry Creek near the REI in Denver.
Even if you don’t play tennis – resurfacing the courts at Memorial Park and adding two hand-ball courts is important. Why? First, it doesn’t reflect well on our city when one of our city parks has shoddy (and in some cases unusable) tennis courts. Studies show that poorly-maintained parks become breeding grounds for vandalism and graffiti. The money for the upgrades came from the TOPS parks category. TOSC pressed both the Mayor and the City Council to promise that maintenance dollars from the increased TOPS maintenance fund would go towards improving parks infrastructure, and was very supportive of the list of TOPS parks projects for 2014. Tennis courts as well as new playgrounds topped the list. Progress on these new projects mean that our elected officials are keeping their promises!
For several years we’ve been forced to focus on poor maintenance and inadequate funding for our parks, trails and open spaces. These new projects show the value of investing in our parks, and show that our policy-makers realize that parks improvements add fuel to a key economic driver in our community.