Charles City Parks & Rec Board picks company for inclusive playground

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Charles City Parks and Recreation Board moved ahead on two big projects at its monthly meeting Wednesday night, choosing a company to work with to build an inclusive playground at Sportsmen’s Park, and making a list of priorities for features to add to the swimming pool repair project if money is available.

The board also briefly discussed another big project facing the community – doing maintenance work on and potentially upgrading the whitewater course on the Cedar River.

The Parks & Rec Board is anticipating having a little more than $259,000 available to work with for an inclusive playground. That includes about three year’s worth of the board’s share of the annual city hotel/motel tax receipts for a total of about $180,000.

It also includes a $50,000 donation from Steve White in memory of his mother, Donna White, and potentially more than $29,000 from the Park & Rec Board’s “Monopoly”-style game fundraiser where the squares on the game board were sold to sponsors and the games themselves will be sold.

The Parks & Rec Board members looked at inclusive playground proposals from two different companies, Boland Recreation of Marshalltown and Play-Pro Recreation of Clive.

Charles City Parks and Recreation Department Director Tyler Mitchell said both companies got good reviews from cities or schools he talked to that had worked with them.

One major difference, which Mitchell said appealed to him, and with which several board members agreed, was that Play-Pro included in its price doing the preparation work needed to get a site ready for the project, in addition to actually assembling the playground and installing the ground surface.

Boland contracts out the installation, Mitchell said, and the Parks and Rec Department would be required to prepare the site and do other advance work.

Also, if there were problems that needed correcting or fixing, Play-Pro does its own work and customers Mitchell talked to said the company responded very quickly. Because Boland contracts the installation, it would need to get in touch with the contractor and arrange for that company to address any problems.

Both companies had proposed playgrounds costing about $240,000 installed, but Mitchell emphasized that the board members could make that price go up or down according to the features that they choose for the playground, and whether to make the entire ground surface poured rubber or to use less expensive wood chips for part of the surface.

The board members unanimously decided on Play-Pro Recreation, and Mitchell said he would contact the company to begin preparing options for the board members.

Mitchell also said there was about $13,200 of additional work he would like to do at Sportsmen’s park to go along with a new playground, including seating areas, doing some sidewalk work, new signage and making the restrooms ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant.

Also at the meeting, Mitchell said JEO Consulting, the group the city is working with on the swimming pool repair project, has determined that the pool will not have to end its season early this summer in order for all the repairs to be finished in time to open at the regular time for the 2025 season.

He also said JEO had suggested that instead of replacing both diving boards as part of the repair project, that only one diving board be replaced and the savings be used to install a rock climbing wall on the edge of the pool. The savings would pay for a rock climbing wall wide enough for one person at a time to use.

Part of JEO’s estimate for the cost of the pool repairs includes a 20% cost overrun contingency amount of $107,000, and Mitchell asked the board members to give him a list of other feature priorities he could tell JEO to add to the pool project if all or part of that contingency isn’t spent on the repairs.

The board members agreed that their first choice would be additional play equipment in the shallow end of the pool, followed by anchored floatables in the middle depth area, followed by making the rock climbing wall wider so more than one person at a time could use it.

The board also discussed work that may need to be done on the city whitewater course, which opened 13 years ago in the spring of 2011.

Mitchell said that Ty Graham of Waverly, an experienced kayaker who was one of the first people to suggest that a whitewater course be built on the Cedar River in Charles City, had reached out to him and to Mayor Dean Andrews, suggesting that there may be some safety concerns developing on the course due to changes that have occurred over the years.

Board members agreed that it will probably take being awarded a grant to do significant work on the kayak course.

“It’s something that the Park and Rec Board can’t do themselves. It’s going to be way too much money. So it’s going to have to be all city or a combination of city and Park and Rec to do it,” Mitchell said.

Mayor Andrews, who was at the meeting, said, “It would have to be a grant, because we don’t have it in the city budget, either.”

Andrews said the kind of work Graham was talking about was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he was also suggesting possible upgrades to the course to keep up with the many other whitewater courses being developed in the Midwest.

Charles City had the first whitewater course in Iowa, so it’s also the oldest, Andrews said.

Mitchell said he would invite Graham to come to the board’s May meeting to discuss the topic.