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October 30, 2018 Master Park Plan Presentation


MASTER PARK PLAN PRESENTATION
Notes taken by a town resident
The Master Park Plan Presentation  & this map poster can be viewed at the Town Clerk's office
A resident recorded the presentation and then typed it up for those who could not attend.  If you see a blank line – that means the word was inaudible on the tape.
Master Park Plan and New Park Plan for Fireman's Grove Presentation at the Town of Ballston Town Board Agenda Meeting on October 30, 2018
Town of Ballston Master Park Plan presentation by CT Male rep. Mr. Frank Palumbo

“It was a real pleasure to work with your parks committee. Certainly, with Kelly and _______at meetings, they got big and broad when they needed to be big and broad and they got down to focus when they needed to get down to focus. It was a straight forward process. We began meeting back in May I believe, we met on a monthly basis, had some sight visits in the interim, so what I’ll do is describe the process first very quickly, cuz what I’m interested in is those types of questions that you may have and how we got to where we got to.
So you all have a copy, you don’t see the word FINAL on there, we did take off the word DRAFT, but if there are comments we certainly can incorporate them into the FINAL.
So what we did was we initially met with the committee and went thru the outline and one of the first maps we were using was, again, big and broad, the whole town, what do we see? We identified and talked with them, just in general, before getting even to that next step down, what do we have? where is it? what works well? and the committee was very diverse. Some people we had were already very involved with Anchor Diamond Park, some people had gone thru the school district and rec programs or had knowledge of those and so they knew how the interactions of those were. We had the obvious recreational assets like the bike path, we had Jenkins Park and the knowledge of that being a taxing district in and of itself, so we tried to access the big picture items in the initial phase.
Then we moved on to, you had done a town wide survey in 2015 which was pretty exhaustive. The number of comments that were there and the type of comments that people had…a lot of times when you get those surveys..if you get 50/50 positive comments, negative comments….ya know, this is really, I’d say in the range of 90% constructive comments of what people thought would be good for the town. So, it really gave us a good snapshot of where many different people, and it was also a broad number of people, it was not just focused on a few people making a lot of comments. So, we summarized in the report, I won’t go through every one of them, but I’ll just sort of tell you the topic areas that we started to address.
And one of the things that seemed very important to residents in that survey was the connectivity and accessibility of the parks. And the connectivity was talked about from the framework of connecting neighborhoods to the parks. And then potentially inter-connecting the parks themselves. Having safe access on both _____ and the broad side and if you chose to walk to the park that was nearest you , that you could do so in a safe manner. And if you were going from the school to a park you would be able to do that in a safe manner.
It included other areas of safety that we talked about were some of the lake access points, the fishing locations, Outlet Rd, and safety in that area so where you have recreational access, probably it would be upgraded to be more safe for the residents.
We considered protection of farmland and open space was a big topic with many, and really, the town has a very large open farm area to the north. What you see should be explained. What we are showing on there is a lot of the natural features, some of the wetlands, we had topography on one of the maps, just to sort of show areas what might be likely to be natural linkages where development might not occur but if you could use buffer areas in your wetlands that will ultimately possibly have trails that could be used to connect thru there, and really thru the center core of that is Anchor Diamond Park which you could see having spoke out from that.
One of the other things is bike uses. A lot of comments on safe biking. You get a range when you say there were some negative comments you would get comments of people saying ‘Those bikers think they can go anywhere’ and then you have a lot of bikers saying ‘ We just want a safe place to ride.’ So, they’re really saying almost the same thing in terms of a desired condition, something that doesn’t inhibit the actual flow of traffic, and has a safe place for bikers to connect to, the bike rails and trails they can get to and connect to outside of the town as well.
We considered the boat launch and fishing pier improvements that was in the survey, and other areas that didn’t have as many people talking about but certainly got a lot of talk. Potential area of dog park, the pool or splash pad, some sort of water feature. Summer rec programs, they thought there should have some improvements with that. Volleyball courts, lacrosse fields, the inter-connection with school facilities, and the Jenkins Park district from the context a lot of the the comments in the survey were ‘should we or should we not continue to maintain the separate taxing district?’. And then the lake uses for all seasons. What you could potentially do to have winter access to the lake, and also possibly heading towards a public beach that would be more suitable for swimming that what is available at this time.
So what we did after analyzing that, and also seeing some of these places first hand. I have to say I had a town resident who was an intern with us this summer, at the forestry school, going for landscaping architect, I have to mention that I’m a landscape architect, and she was an incredible asset to have on this project. As a town resident, I liked to ask her things like ‘so when you were growing up what did you do, how did you do this?’ It was invaluable, and she’s got a great future ahead of her, we’re gonna hope we keep getting her back, but the town of Ballston did a very good job of raising at least that much out of her, she was wonderful.
So, we went back and we fine-tuned some of these items and the Parks and Rec Committee had some other items that they considered. So, the connectivity and accessibility really became a big item, ya know, how could we have that type of community that could have easy access, safe access to all of the parks? Oh, and one of the things in the survey, people thought they should have a variety of uses, but spread throughout the park. So, you didn’t need a playground here here here here and here, but if we could have, and we sort of started seeing the backbone of what you already have. Anchor Diamond Park, a very nice, very burgeoning use as a passive preserve, walking park, but it doesn’t have to be in every part of the park. People can access this. Where you have fields and where you have playgrounds doesn’t have to be necessarily in the same place.
And another thing we did when we did the inventory was looking at what was very close to you. So what was nearby the town, the town residents were already using. Shenentaha is the example. Its in Malta but its very very close to many of your residents so we didn’t want to duplicate things that we weren’t really culturally going to change. People were more than likely still going to attend there unless there is something else inhibiting them from doing so, so we wanted to balance that out through the town, that was one of the things we talked about. Something that probably wouldn’t have been picked up in the survey if the committee wasn’t in tune with the idea of programming and advertising, and advertising from the standpoint of letting people know what we already have, what is going on, and how we can get them really captured to understand the parks and recreation facilities in the town. Implementing safety features, as time goes on, the committee, what we were trying to do was get to that point of saying ‘how can, at every one of our facilities, look at it from the standpoint of safety?’
Part of what I was saying in advertisement was maintaining a better web presence , we did look into how that idea would be done, more work would have to be done in terms of adding that to the town website.
And improving coordination with the school and the town departments. There’s a lot of inter-connectiveness with maintenance that is being provided for parks and recreation areas, the schools are obviously places with playgrounds and athletic fields. A lot of what we listed in the report you might have seen, we were using the terminology as ‘passive’. You can do active things in those parks, you can run on a trail, walking may be more passive, we termed it as passive as compared to the actual youth sports programs where you have fields, that kind of active. That’s where we had drawn the line of differentiating between those.
So we also did an inventory of all the existing facilities, we investigated the partnerships with the schools, we looked at the nearby recreation facilities to see how they blended in, we considered what would be necessary in terms of acquiring land in some of these areas. We did not push forward in that direction, we just sort of highlighted where and how could that be done? An example of that was, if a project could come forward on a particular part of land and they have had some sort of land set aside, and it happened to be the right place in order to have a connectivity between two of the parks, that’s something that, without doing a lot of work, or acquiring land, just watching the planning board process, the types of developments that were occurring, could help in assisting and really sort of idea forming, as developments were occurring, how we could blend with what we have with the existing park facilities.
And then we went on to areas of improvement, we talked a little bit about lake access….the bike path connections. One of the things that has been and still is currently still that issue is how we can potentially connect the bike path to points north, to the Jim Smith trails to really open that up to a much wider geography, the county is expanding trail systems and that little bit there, ya know, we did reach out and try to start conversations with National Grid, but it’s not their ‘hot topic’ , so it’s something that has to be continued to be pursued, and in the right time. Ya don’t want to go to National Grid and say we want to do this and then really not have a plan to push forward, we want to do it at the right time.
And then we very much got into Firemans Grove, and I’ll get to that in terms of what plans we have come up for that.
Jenkins Park, we did talk, and put information in there, and think that one of the recommendations should be the further consideration of should that stay its own taxable district or should the park really become one of the parks of the town, which it is, but in terms of who is really doing the management of that.
And Anchor Diamond Park, the one thing that I can tell you that is really very ever present is that there is really a strong group that is working on that right now, they are very organized, so I think there will be things that come forth in the future, but right now they’ve got a very good model of where they are approaching that, and how they’re approaching that. One of the first meetings that I was at was with some boy scouts who were doing their Eagle scout project in terms of how to do some benches for the park. So there was some very easy communication between the two groups, so Anchor Diamond Park is kind of running by a very good group of people who are committed to it.
So, moving on to what we got to in terms of recommendations. ….
We looked at these from breaking it down, these are the overall recommendations, I’ll get to the specific ones.
• But in the short term of 1-2 years, we want to develop that greater web presence. Articulate to people where the parks are, we got a sense from the survey that some people were saying they needed something that we knew was already there, so we wanted to get word out.
• Another short term plan would be to develop a final action plan for Firemans Grove and a preliminary design for that, I’ll get to that in more detail, so I’ll wait on that.
• But then, development of existing and potential future for future trail map… that’s something where we have knowledge of where trails are, we have knowledge of where trails are outside of town boundaries, looking for those specific connection points, something that should be done over the next 1-2 years.
• Identify the development action plans to improve the overall safety at existing parks, we think this is a key item and should be done on a site by site basis of what design features could actually be done to help improve the safety. That would range from posting speed limits to having flashing lights at crosswalks, a lot of technical things to possibly be doing with the roads, and some of it could be even bigger in terms of having something that is off-road like a boardwalk that could keep people separated. All of those are items that have different magnitudes of need, both financially and making sure you’re doing things in the right manner, so that would have to be articulated.
• Determine potential user group for use sports organizations and field assessment, we think that that’s an ongoing thing, right now it seems like things are working fairly well, there are certainly some groups that feel like they need more space, but I think that that drives forward by each individual group, sometimes a group will be very strong for awhile and then drop off. I know when I did my lacrosse coaching it had a few years where it seemed like we were bucking at the seams with field uses and then we had a little bit of a drop off, and then it came back even stronger. So you have to sort-of monitor that and see what the right thing is and how active and supportive the group is to be contributing towards the potential cost of those fields. So, if they want dedicated space, what you can do for that.
On the medium term,
• we talked about how to monitor park usage and setting a baseline for the necessary maintenance. You right now, if we did nothing else with Firemans Grove…. You’re going to have a pavilion, you now have it, you’re going to be leasing it…there’s going to be needs for watching out in terms of vandalism, there’s going to be needs for establishing that baseline. How much should the lease fees for the facility be in order to take care of the maintenance that would be necessary on a regular basis in for getting garbage, and what technique to do that. I know Kelly did some research on how that is being done in another town, so there is some groundwork laid on that one as well.
• And also, a big one, monitoring town growth, we’ve been one of the faster growing communities. That has positive and that has pressures that come with it. As the census comes in next you’re going to get more detailed information, you’ll see probably by witnessing whether that’s a lot of growth in terms of people who do not have young children that want more of the active use sports, or that you’re having more people who are looking for that passive use and trails and everything else. You’re going to have to monitor that and stay with it so you’re having the facilities in place when they’re really asking for them.
We’re going to go on to connectivity goals for the long-term.
• A big thing with connect the major parks, it will be a long-term goal to try to get Anchor Diamond Park, Jenkins Park and Firemans Grove so they have 80% off-road and designated safe bicycling within ten years. So, connecting the parks and having safe bicycling. Big goals, you’re going to have steps along the way to get there.
• Expand the capability of existing 3.5 mile bike trail to 5 times it’s current length by connecting north to the Jim Smith trail. Again, these are from 5-10 years that we’re looking at. Select the best location for east-west connector routes to access the bike path, the path is going in that generally north-south direction, how can you get a good location and have a safe access that then connects over east to west and has basically feeders into that to get people safely to the bike path.
• Coordinate with the town and the county for sidewalk improvements. I’ll mention this a little bit when I get to the Firemans Grove plan. But if things are going to be happening with roadway improvements, where they can connect to the park plan of safe accessibility, there should be dots along there.
• And there were comments in the survey about horse trails. We think that the natural area for that would be more toward the north end of the town and that’s something that we think should be something to keep an eye on it, and look to that as a future initiative.
• And then the one that sort-of stands on its own that can be done at the right time, so you folks would be making that decision because it does involve staffing, and that’s the potential hire of an Executive Director for a Parks Director.
Mr. Goslin asked “does the person that applies use a lawn mower? We need that one first The executive lawnmower attendant. “
Mr. Palumbo: “Maintenance is one, and there may be a transition period moving away from maintenance…”
Mr. Goslin “you can call them Executive Directors but I’ll say lawnmowers.”
Ms. Stewart “there are places where that happens.”
Mr. Palumbo: “So, one of the things that we foresee is that if Firemans Grove takes off, and, this committee as great as it was, there’s certain day to day features that they would not be able to handle in order to start making the right choices in terms of how to spend town money and make recommendations to you.. So now I’m going to move onto Firemans Grove. What we did with Firemans Grove, and I hope everybody can see this well enough, there is a board showing the plan. So after brainstorming and coming up with some of the things that we thought were worth implementing. The first thing that you have up in the corner is where the pavilion is, so that is the black circle that is up in the left hand corner. That is where the existing pavilion that is currently being refabricated and improved. In that area you also have an existing kitchen building and an existing bathroom. Expenditures towards there, you’ve already made commitments, but what might have to be done in the near term might be what you’re going to do with…and it doesn’t have to be a huge expense…just a greater focus and some estimating on what’s necessary for the kitchen, things have use of the facility, you don’t want to run into your insurance policy if somebody’s down there, so its better to use…the safer to use…the better chances you have there. One of the important things, moving from the outside in, we’re looking at Firemans Grove as being a southern terminus of the bike path. The bike path comes right to its door. But safe crossing of the road there, good detonation of the entry into the park….right now it’s kind of a free-for-all into there. There’s also the potential of of highway work is being done, sidewalks that could connect to other portions of town. So some of that is part of the park plan but it could be part of the highway plan, its part of the connectivity that we’re talking about. You move into the site, so right at this point here there is a divide, you go into the park, the land that is now town land, and you can see that that entrance, what we’re trying to do, we will need parking. That’s one of the things we have to do, we want an improved entrance there. We want the park to have a good brand as soon as you enter it, that’s why we thought of having a good connection coming into the site. There is a private road right down here, all along the property which is National Grid land. There is right of access in the crosses, to the best that can be determined at this point, and we’ve seen that this can continue to be used, and again that might be something that is all set in stone with National Grid. But coming into the site, one of the areas that we wanted to work on first is this area right in here. This area in blue is where we’re planning a splash pad, this area is a playground, the playground would have handicapped accessibility as would features of the splashpad. The playground would be a combination of traditional features, and what is a really booming part of the playground industry is natural playgrounds. Things that kids can climb that are…there are parts that have a culvert, a 36 inch culvert that you might see on a construction site but they’ve buried it into a tunnel that kids can go in, maybe just stones on the ground that can be used to climb for the small children”
Mr. Goslin “Don’t mention a culvert, then we’re gonna have to get the army corp of engineers…” (laughter)
Mr. Palumbo: “ So that’s a new trend, we think you can have a balance there. And then the building that is shown there, don’t overlook on the size of it, we just wanted on this plan for it to be very evident. But what we’re looking at is the potential there to have changing rooms, where if you needed to upgrade bathrooms at the facilty, possibly they could be there. You could have possibly concessions and storage so you could have another revenue generator at that point. The splashpad itself would have a fence around it so that if you did charge for that as many towns do, you would have it controlled, so you would know that you have access to it, that’s all decision making to go and tie with the financing. But we then looked at was…there’s a large field there right in this central area. What we thought was a large multi-purpose field which could be used for occasional sporting event, if somebody had a tournament you could do something there, but we really wanted a large open space that would be more free for the user, the folks who are using pavilion wanted to go down to have a place to throw the Frisbee, if they wanted to have a pick up kickball game that a multi-use field …level the circuit, a little ruddy right now but just something. And the other thing that we show on the corner of that is an amphi-theatre here. This is a multi-purpose amphi-theater. We thought it could be used for town functions. We thought it could be used for possibly a summer stage type of group. We thought it could be used for students from the schools, when we were talking we were talking about Noah who was on our committee who was a high school student was the main thing, places for teens to actually have something to do. Maybe you have a band nite there for the teens. It’s just shown in concept here, detailing of that and each one of these items will really be given more thought.
Mr. Goslin “before you get off of the amphi-theatre.. the whole idea I thought of the amphi-theatre would to make use of the hillside and that does not make use of the hillside. “
Mr. Palumbo: “ We’re right at the corner of it. And one of the things that we wanted to do…there will be more design stats. We were working with the wider topography. If we got into the final design, one of the things were thinking of was like benching into the hillside and having simple earth seating there but then maybe the physical structure of the band shell or the stage that we actually thought about most productions might be in the evening or most use might be during the evening, that’s looking to the east so you’d have the sun behind you, you’d be looking down that way, we did give enough thought in terms of where we’re placing it, but more work has to be done.”
Mr. Goslin “Right. Before the existing pavilion, if you have a way for the pavilion to go down naturally into the seating area of the amphi-theatre…”
Mr. Palumbo: “you can see the trail coming down from that pavilion, I almost envision that coming in from the upper end of the benched in terraced seating…”
Mr. Goslin “so which way would be the bandstand, which way would be the seating in that picture?”
Mr. Palumbo “so, the bandstand would be here facing the seating, which would be here, and it was intended to go up the hill. We wanted to work with the natural topography there because we wanted it more natural, we didn’t want to have metal bleecher- type seating or anything like that, we want it to look like it fits into the park, and I really think we can make something that would…don’t really have to have that much ____, because when you think about how much you’re stepping up, ya know you’re going up 12-18 inches in those types of situations so it’s nice to sit on the edge or sit back on grass or lean up against the next seat. So, the climb there is not as much as ____, it’s not red rock, it’s not ______, it’s not that kind of thing, but it’s still working with the ______ that you’re suggesting. So, the other thing then was down at the farther end of the park, down here, and the idea for eventually an alternate pavilion, to have two pavilions on the site, and then therefore potentially have double the revenue, and double the usage for town residents. I don’t mean to go to revenue, but revenue is a fact of life, that we have to support this. But this would then give more revenue the capability of leasing the facility for a family event or an organizational event, and one of the things that was also on here…there was an existing pond here…the day we were walking I couldn’t get through the gate…but we looked at that as being a summer feature, it would have to be safe, we’d watch out for how we treated the edges there, but also in the winter that possibly you could have skating and use of the pavilion as a place to sit, have some hot cocoa, put your skates on, do the things that would make use here.”
Tim “Could any part of that be a dog park? It’s currently fenced in, I know it’s hard to see that there, there’s a lot of overgrowth there, but there’s a fence all the way around there, but we had talked about potentially putting a dog park there.”
Mr. Palumbo: “We did not talk about that because we thought we had more assets here. But…. and the one thing I would advise against, because it would be a very natural thing….it is fenced in, ya know, could ya go and do something now? Once you do something, imagine taking a dog park away from someone?”
Tim “Oh yeah.”
Mr. Palumbo: “So whether or not there’s another place or another way to incorporate that in here, we tried to stay with some flexibility, so that you could…in fact…Kelly if I may…just the one thing…I said this space here that you’re talking about …the 2nd pavilion…what if another opportunity came up that we didn’t think about?….what we talked to the committee about?…maintain that flexibility to say Does it fit with the overall?? Could it be an asset? Are there people that are going to benefit? And then you reconsider. So, anything that we have, ideas should be brought forward to the committee so that they can continue to build this into the thing that I think we all want. “
Ms. Stewart “And the 2nd pavilion is intended for a longer range, and it could be done, you had it in here looking for a more indoor _______, and do we want to invest to that degree, then the 2nd ___ area, maybe develop further with more enclosed space rather than a pavilion. So, your question about the dog park, in terms of if the town were to take over Jenkins Park, which is something that needs _______which what is we talked about, and the committee support, is that that area maybe______ a dog park.”
Mr. Palumbo “Olivia went out there and came back to the office and was telling me what she had seen. She said there was an old baseball field that looked like it wasn’t getting used and out in the middle of that fenced area was someone throwing a ball to a dog, is that appropriate?
The last thing that you see there is a lot of the yellow, trails thru the woods. One of the things with that is …we thought…having something where if a family came to the playground and somebody just needed to go for a walk, a young child wanted to….and the mom said you take them and we’ll stay with the other kids here…or…somebody is at the pavilion and they said ‘I just need to get out for a walk’. Have something like that. The other thought we had with it, potentially, ya know, the school district at the time was going thru a bond issue, that was their focus. Talking with them about uses that might connect to the school, further talk like that is something we wanted to keep open. Running teams: very very big in this town. So, whether or not they could connect to that, have safe places to continue their trails off the road, and safer. You will need parking, and we talked about how we could ______ that as well.
Tim “Ya know another vision that I had for this new park that we acquired is…just like Griswald park is up in Ballston Spa…they have music there every Thursday nite, and that draws the community to that park, and they also have a farmers market, and I think that would be a huge draw. Farmers market, music every Thursday, Friday nite…whatever it may be…I think that’d be a great location for it.
Mr. Palumbo: “Think about all of the different ways you could do all of that. If the farmers market wanted to do that. You could almost use some of those parking areas where they could back their trucks right up to that multi-use field, get a trail along there, the idea that if you had musical groups out there, the multi-use field, the reason we didn’t want to have too conflicting with anything else like..that you could just throw blankets or chairs or something down in that area…actually we thought about how the band/stage could be turned in both directions. So, open to the field…like if the town had fireworks, or something like that. That’s why we thought about keeping that multi-use field larger and freer for flexibility. It’s a good size, it’s not immense and that’s why we’re trying to select the uses that would be most appropriate.
I don’t know how far you want to go but one of the things we did, what you’re seeing here is a potential phasing of the work. This plan was tailored towards the idea…if next year you wanted to go for a park grant. We talked about the grants going out in July…the CFA grants. We do see this type of income the town is seen as having their financial stability, that that grant would be mostly a matching grant, so you’d be paying whatever…it’s 50/50. That’s our suspicion, whether or not the rules come out for what the grants are next year…..but that’s our suspicion. So we tried to form …..the maximum of that grant is $500,000 from the state….so we tried to form a $1 million project out of this. My recommendations are this, that if you choose to go forward, you go for the most you can because they only do it once. You can’t come back for other things. It’s not like…as our grant expert was telling me….the local waterfront revitalization plans…if you are successful on one grant, they’ll be looking for you to come back and come back and come back, they want you to continue on that. But on the parks grant it’s more of a onetime shot. If you do a small plan, and that may be what you choose to do, just know that the option may not be available the year after that. Just something to consider.
And what we also have in the plan, on the last page, is a breakdown of cost. One of the things you’ll see with that, for all of these improvements, we came up with a number that was about $2 million dollars. We were conservative I believe. There are ways to…we left at this point in time…and I explained this to the committee…at this point in time …because there’s so much we don’t know….about the details of the project…we left in about a 30% contingency. I think that’s a fair thing to do at this time, but as you move into the project and start getting into more detail, you’ll start to see where those numbers can be done. There are again ways to be flexible with that. We looked at the parking at this phase, coming into about here. We looked at the splash pad and the playground at about 50%, so the _________ would be prepared but then you might only buy half of the features, that were necessary…or half the costs that you would be doing that. And then you could add other features in future years.”
Tim “Ya know on Main St. there, one of the big concerns I have there I think needs to be improved, obviously, is the sign. It’s so easy to drive by there and you don’t even know it’s there.”
Mr. Palumbo: “We put that landscaping signage and things like that because it really does…we really thought about it….I had mentioned the term before…branding…we do not want to do so little that people don’t even know it’s there… that does not gather the support that you need for it. People using the pavilions will be the first order of business…they will know its there and they can spread the word. You don’t want to have people saying ‘it’s a splash pad and it has one spout on it’. I say that if you make a commitment toward that, you go towards enough to make it something that people say ‘that’s where I want to go’.
Tim: “I can even envision that being an Eagle scout project , a large sign, _______ ‘Welcome to Ballston’ “
Mr. Palumbo: “There are many ways to do it and that’s the type of thing, working continuously with the committee, working and getting feedback from the town board, and what they think is acceptable., how staffing and other things are going to be necessary, to cut the lawn, do the directorship, work with the other departments, that’s all stuff that has to sort of ________, you have to keep it moving. And even though I’ve developed this as a phase one type of plan, it doesn’t mean that it’s the absolute phase one. If further logic goes into it, cost and ways of doing it, if somebody thought that the most important thing out here was the amphitheater, well you can work towards that. And we tried to put in that spreadsheet that you have, we tried to articulate it, we were thinking in that ten-year range, so we tried to chunk it off in about 2-3 year or 2 ½ year blocks, of potential expenditures. And I think some of that _______with happy to do first phase, you consider it your revenue stream, you consider how it works with the town budget, and you move forward from there. Did I miss anything Kelly? Do you want me to go into anymore detail?”
Tim: “I think you’re spot on with everything you covered. Actually, I want to go over multiple items here. I’ll go thru them quickly. But I am just amazed at the amount of effort by the Parks and Rec Committee, the hard work that you folks did on this. I mean, the proof is right here, right? And everything that Mr. Palumbo covered here, I think it was exactly what the board was looking for and again I greatly appreciate all of the efforts. So some of the comments that I had, questions and so forth, and I broke some a few of the things down during the presentation, Frank. One question I have, now that we’re going to have a Master Park Plan…going back to that bike path…on this board…we have been for years…talking about trying to improve that bikepath…work with National Grid…unsuccessfully, ok?...its very frustrating. Are you telling me that with the implementation of this that this doesn’t give us a little more teeth to move forward with this?”
Mr. Palumbo: “I think it you a model of saying that this is what’s important to our community. It’s not just one board member thinking about it. If this is an adopted park plan, and its part of it, it’s saying that your community wants it. The other thing that is happening, as I’ve mentioned, is that as far as the amount that I know is that the county is continually looking to expand their trail network so that you can get to more places in the county. So maybe we can enlist help from the county to say why would we not want to have this connection when it could help that goal of getting bikers and families who use these…safely to destinations and get that outside experience that they want? The other factor is that Fireman’s Grove is a terminus park. Imagine if you could say that people who are riding on the Jim Smith trail could also find access to there and experience your community. Many of the members were talking about how they were using _________ in other towns because they didn’t have it here. If you had it set up as a revenue, would you want those people getting access to your place? If people in the town had that full access and you were holding the fireworks and they decided they would rather walk down that distance rather than get in their car and deal with the traffic afterwards..and they have flashlights and they can get back home…whatever….once you get the physical in place…all of those things become available options. So, I think it should help. I think maybe enlisting folks at the county to say ‘how do we deal with National Grid on this? ‘Maybe we say a county and a town initiative pushes it forward for that connection? I know that they were at one point, I understood… they were looking for a certain mileage for themselves through the county. If you could connect this, all of the sudden, just like we’re saying it connects to many more miles, it would connect to their trails here as well.”
Tim: “The other thing with Jenkins Park, I just recently talked to the chair about an issue over there…with a suspicious package here this weekend, I talked to her about what are the thoughts about disbanding the tax district, ya know…dissolving it, right?....And there are still mixed views on that on the board..they’re still talking about it but again, there are mixed views.”
Mr. Palumbo: “I don’t know all of these people as well as you do, but I think that starts with an earnest conversation, saying what are the pros and cons? Rather than people thinking what the pros and cons are, having an actual dialogue…if the board is only talking with themselves, they may have reasons why and they may have questions…well this board can answer those questions, the Parks and Rec board can answer some of those questions…so dialogue is going to help.”
Tim:
“The other thing…near Fireman’s Grove…I know there’s some school district land right next to it that may be available for sale, from what I understand, so again, I think that aligns with what you said here this evening.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Right and as I mentioned, their focus was elsewhere at the time, we were turning heads, they were turning heads there, I have a feeling now that their bond issue has passed….and with the actions that they are going to be taking…maybe there will be more opportunities for discussing those.”
Tim:
“There very well may be. And then, in addition, you had mentioned in Shenentaha Park, and just to let you know, I’ve had residents approach us from Chapel Hill just up the road, having a sidewalk down for that park. I’ve had the Malta Town Supervisor talk to me also about ‘hey, is there anything we can do here jointly here, a joint effort to maybe make something like that happen?’ so again, that dialogue definitely is alive and well.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Ya know, some things make sense sharing between communities. The park I worked at in high school was right on the border of another town, and the two towns weren’t working together at one point and they actually had us spending time at the entrance checking __________, it was not what anyone wanted but it was like one telling the other ‘hey , you’ve got to work with us, it’s not just your free park here’. But when you look at how close many of your residents are to there, working something with Malta is probably a very logical thing, and what it could do is help secure the use of that, so that something like that doesn’t happen in the future where they say ‘hey, you guys can’t come to this park, we have to keep it just to our residents.”
Tim:
“ The other thing is, and Kelly can attest to this, we just interviewed candidates for two maintenance positions that start Nov. 13th, and during those interviews we actually talked about expectations and one of them being….and this is a change for us….this is definitely a major change….more responsibility…a lot of difficult _______including the clerks office, ya know….reservations, right?, reservations for this for ______________, so what we did was we integrated that discussion with these two individuals and told them we ‘re going to get a lot of folks….that new pavilion goes up….we’re going to add a new concrete deck anytime…that’s going to get used a lot…that’s the hope….its what we want…so again, we’re having that discussion and expectation for these maintenance folks to go off and get it ready for different things.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“I would think there would be nothing better for that park and for the revenue and for the pavilion than somebody who had a sense of ‘this is my responsibility, I care for this’. I don’t want to have somebody calling the town board saying the park looked dirty when we got there. Assuming that most of these people are town residents, they’re going to want to have it that way.”
Tim:
“One thing I did struggle with, and you had talked about it, Firemans Grove being a passive park. When I read that, it really came out at me. I really think that to me, I see that as an active park, right?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“It really is in the definition of how you look at it, and it’s fair. It probably should be classified as an active park because it certainly is classed….it really probably should have been much more towards defining the active youth sports field, that kind of thing, even adult field , like there are adult softball and stuff, those are different organizational matters rather than somebody who just comes to the park to recreate. The semantics of it is probably between what I’m thinking of the definition but I certainly understand your point on that.”
Tim:
“Well what I’m saying too, the Zim Smith trail, is that really passive? Ya know?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“We could modify the definition there. I would just take it out.”
Tim:
“I didn’t look at your final draft, but 5.3 Fireman’s Grove…we were pretty aggressive in getting that pavilion torn down. You have a statement in here about the existing pavilion on site scheduled for structural upgrade. So again, that’s a change, right? We tore that down. “
Mr. Palumbo:
“Yes, I think that was written….so we could…I don’t think we did….I will take care of it….I think we wrote that at the time when we knew it was going to happen.”
Tim:
“And then, medium term, 7.2.3 between 60-80% of potential improvements within 5 years. Is there going to a list developed dealing with that? “
Kelly Stewart:
“There will.” (? mumbled)
Tim:
“Ok so off of this list here? Is this what you’re talking about?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Yes. Take the spreadsheet that shows all the different features, cover and where we’re looking at the percentages that are done for each of those, it should add up.”
Tim:
“Oh, ok. And um… under 7.2.4 …. monitor real estate activities of properties, my question is who and how? How is this going to be performed?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Well so what I was suggesting to the parks committee is possibly setting up so that one or two members of the committee would assign themselves and vary it to just attend planning board meetings. The planning board is looking at a project as it is proposed, they are not in tuned with what the idea of what the parks committee is hoping for. Being that, and catching it as timed, say at the sketched plan, having a lightbulb go off and say ‘hey, do you think we can get the developer to do this, separate this little part of the land that doesn’t seem as if it’s that usable…for instance, if it were just for a single family residence, and they just ran the lot lines back, could you do a right of way at the back of those along an area that was not that usable to them, and boy look at that, you connect two things that you want to connect there. So, my recommendation for the Park Committee was to have a frequency of attending the planning board meetings to see what’s happening there, to look and make sure…hey…. this is the thing that they’ve come up with, they should be invested as possible to say, ‘how do we keep track of that?’
Tim:
“I think that’s a great plan.”
Ms. Stewart:
“we can accomplish that by having the committees working together so that the parks committee would be in contact with the planning board and create policies that would accomplish that goal….target areas of access, or of needed access, and when those parcels may come up for development, look to see what the potential for that is.”
Katherine:
“I agree, especially when now that the town has had a plan now for at least a year and a half now, at least making Sophia aware, she has initial contact with the applicant, the town from a planning board standpoint…you do focus on these ________projects, well ______________, that’s always an option to ask for recreational __________parcel, its part of the negotiation process, but really what the planning board is seeing now in the past few years are smaller but more frequent applications, it’s harder to juggle overall planning when you might have six minor sub-divisions ___________. I agree, having a map or some sort of plan in the building department to say ‘hey we want trails that move from here to here’, that way when an applicant comes in for a three lot sub-division, ya know, that’s what we’re seeing now, we’re seeing less and less of the big developments we saw ten years ago which aren’t built now. There is always the opportunity to negotiate the park as a PUDD, but how often really are we seeing those come in front of the board? Maybe one every year or two? I feel like you’re going to get more bang for your buck with looking at smaller projects more than you would than by just hoping that a developer is going to come in and buy a prime piece of property to put a park in.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“And …there is as much planning you can do, sometimes there is serendipity, it just all comes in line, the right project, the right couple of projects come in at the same time and give you that potential for that connection. That’s really all you’re doing, just keeping the eyes open to what it could be. To use a parallel, one of the things that people will complain about sometimes, you do a project and you make them put a sidewalk out front that looks like the sidewalk to nowhere because you’re hoping that it will connect to the next project if that happens. Well, if you think off-road and green linkages, its some one and the same, it may be that off of the one project you just say well…if you know where you want a trail to go, or a connection point, and a developer comes in, well if you can get it to there…and then when the next project comes in…well if you can get it to there….because I can tell you that with the amount of developers I’ve worked with, if they can get a sense of…like…’if I do this, this will help me with this? You’ll look more favorably on …because I’m doing something as a public benefit?’….they’ll often jump on that.”
Tim:
“Just to wrap up my comment here, last one…. So, we’ve even had discussions with our Highway Superintendent….his department has a really overloaded plate and we didn’t want to put that responsibility on the highway arena. So we had talked about is, for example, for Fireman’s Grove, contracting the maintenance to be done there, like lawnmowing, right? See how that goes, right? So again, we have a lot of decisions to make as the board here. And really, like Mr. Goslin talked about Executive Director, that gets your attention, right? What does that mean? It’s got taxes written all over it, right? “
Mr. Palumbo:
“Right.”
Tim:
“So, and again, try to stay away from that. It was real nice to write a $145,000 check ok, paid by developers thru that Parks and Rec Fund, ya know, it didn’t cost the taxpayer a dime for Fireman’s Grove. It’s a really nice place to be. When I tell our township that, they really wish they were in that same place, right? However, when you look at that and the list we have with the master plan here, with the upgrades that really support the survey that was taken and all that, maybe that $350K we had in that account at one point wasn’t enough here, with what we have coming down the road. So I think as we move forward, we have to do this slow and steady, right?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“We tried to do our best to apply a time, just where I said to stay as flexible as possible with planning, we stay as flexible as possible with timing. I’m not admitting, saying put it off, but…ya have to stay within your means and you have to know when to go a little beyond to say that. When you mentioned the contracting, if you get a good orchestrated method of getting those reservations for the pavilion, you’re going to know what your revenue is going to be from that. So that’s going to help in making that decision, to say ‘yeah we can contract out to have that done because that’s going to cover this and then a little bit. I can understand for the staffing levels, maybe you just have to make that commitment and say we have to go with the contracting this year and lets see how it works out. I know when I go to look for a pavilion for graduation weekend or something like that, you’re going to get people who once they know it’s there they’re going to be signing on. “
Tim:
“No doubt about it.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“And again, with that web presence thing that should be done right off the bat, there’s very little cost to that, letting people know this is available, you can lease it, you’ll find people who will say they didn’t even know that existed.”
Tim:
“I have scout masters coming to me right now, they want to have a large event in the spring, ok?, or a major cleaning event where you clean the place up, they want to tie it in with getting more scouts involved, and maybe some future scouts so they’re going to have a large gathering with that, that’s what we want.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“And again the kind of creativity, can they do that and maybe one weekend get the multi-use field have a camping experience like down there like maybe a mini-jamboree type of a thing , that kind of thing where you can work with the organization and say ‘how can we make this happen for everybody?’ “.
Tim:
“Board members? Any more comments here” Bill?”
Mr. Goslin:
“I’d just like to comment on town events. And I don’t think the master plan adequately looks at town events. I would particularly like to see how we would hold a town event at Fireman’s Grove, especially using the access to the school and the parking at the school and Stevens school so I think that the plan needs to show how we would have a town event at Fireman’s Grove until we found a better suitable place for that. So where would we park? I don’t know if you mentioned we access, I think its by the insurance company there, could be a walk-in access there, on the right of way going out to Lake Hill. I think having an entrance in the school so you can use Stevens parking….”
Kelly Stewart:
“Those things were discussed, we had a couple of long conversations with school district officials, they were focused on…as Frank has indicated… their impending bond projects, it did pass obviously, so they will have some construction going on at the moment so they wanted to put off specific discussions on how active the use of the parking area until they were settled with their facility. We did talk about use of the parking garage area as overflow parking and that discussion ________.”
Mr. Goslin:
“Right but this is our plan so we could show this. So, I would like to see how a town event could be held here with the appropriate parking, the size of fireworks or something else, if we had fireworks you’re not going to get it in there. The other thing I would like to talk about, you said active recreation…we’re fairly well off. Where did you get that from?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Maybe not the greatest choice of words. One of the things we thought of that was happening, in past present, there was still use of the school facilities.”
Mr. Goslin:
“Where do the kids play baseball? Where do the kids play soccer?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“At the school.”
Mr. Goslin:
“No, no, I was ____ the soccer club. Where do they go? They can’t afford to get to the school because it costs too much for the field. Where do we play little league baseball? Where do we play pop warner football? The town culture is built around the school and I would love to see active recreation in youth programs that would support the school. I just don’t think we are well off, I think we have a need for active recreation. It could also be used for tractor pulls, or community events that are agriculture related or things like that so I think we missed that gathering space idea in the town is one of my concerns. The other one is the safety. I know you mentioned safety about every other word. I would love to see, getting to all of these facilities is a real safety concern. And I would include getting to the library, getting to the bike path, getting to this park, getting to Jenkins Park, getting to Anchor Diamond. I think we need to think about access, not only like you said safe bicycling. You don’t want to have safe bicycling on Midline Rd. You want to have something go thru like the Morris property, or something go through where you could actually bike and feel safe on a backroad, not on some county highway or state highway where somebodys going east to west. I think that connectivity and safety is really fundamental. Especially when you’re talking about those kids running thru town. I don’t know how they make it. They’re going up and down the bike trail. The trail that connects the school to Seelye Estates. Those are the kind of trails I’m talking about where you really lean back an activity, two ____ parks, not lanes along a highway. And the last thing is lake access, we will only try to do this once….this should be a major….and I didn’t see this in long range planning.”
Kelly:
“It is in there.”
Mr. Goslin:
“Is it in there? It needs to be there because if we are spending all of this money to preserve the lake and the lake is supposed to be a recreation area…I love the winter….I’d be both in the park and on the lake, I think that’s great. I think we need for the residents to take more advantage of the lake itself. Those are my comments.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“One big one I want to get to. I think your point about connectivity to the school, I think that was seen on our list as something that would have to be on-going. We could not just automatically say we were going to use the school property for this. “
Mr. Goslin:
“We’ve had conversations with the school and they identified that parcel as a key piece of property that they’d like to acquire because they would like to use it as well, they’ve got the kids from Stevens school going down and using it as a nature park. The last thing I want to say is the playground. Why are you building a playground when there’s one 100 yards away?”
Ms. Stewart:
“Because its not accessible during the day for mothers and small children.”
Mr. Goslin;
“There’s one in Jenkins Park. I’m just saying, the two playgrounds in town are right next to each other, why would we build another one?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“It was seen as a dual purpose there. So as Kelly just pointed out, for people who could not use those during the day but wanted to, and then the other, its an asset for the pavilion to use. If you have a lot of families there, they’re not necessarily going to walk up to the school from there when they can go right there to a playground.”
Mr. Goslin:
“Beautiful playground right down the street.”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Now the other thing I want to get back to, what you’re seeing there is almost 200 parking spaces. What we didn’t want to do was to make it all parking.”
Mr. Goslin:
“If you could walk in from the Buell Heights area, wouldn’t that be nice to be able to walk in on a nice path from Buell Heights?”
Mr. Palumbo:
“Absolutely. We did not disregard any of that. We tried to just do this plan concentrated with the idea of a connection. We did have something about in the process of connectivity and what was happening with some sidewalks that were being done in the area that are already on an identified plan. We are thinking the same way, I really do think we are, in terms of how can we get more people connected to this.”
Mr. Goslin:
“I like the parking along the front road. That allows parking and probably makes it easy…”
Mr. Palumbo:
“If we had the second access down there, we also thought that not only would you have parking there, but for certain events… controlled parking. We’d have them come down one way, go out there, come all the way down here, and feed back in this way. I think that’d be the most efficient way to do that.”
Kelly then thanked the committee for all of their hard work, and said:
“ the plan is intended to be a guiding document for the committee to help focus our work, its intended to be an institutional knowledge type of document where when the members of this committee are gone, new people coming in have some background and something that will tell them about the park in the town, ______________we’ll have a couple of copies, it will increase the framework for our discussions. This document will help us to focus efforts at every meeting. There are no specific _____________of the long range plan, it doesn’t _______ telling you to do anything specific, it just helps the committee to move forward with the various projects. Thank you.”
Katharine:
“Kelly will this be posted to the website when the board accepts it?”
Kelly:
“Its kind of large, I don’t know if a pdf can be, we can talk about that, we’ll have a couple on file. But if there’s a way to put it on the website, it will be there. It needs to be…its kind of a living document, like ya know…_______that we can tweek, there are changes…like the new pavilion, so we can change that section of the document, and I don’t want to be put into the position where its up on the web and its outdated, when we move forward on things, because that will be a work in progress that will be continually updated but we can talk about putting it online.”
Tim:
“Ok thank you I appreciate it.”

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