MOUNT VERNON – City Councilmember Amber Keener brought her fellow councilmembers to Memorial Park on Monday in a special meeting to show them the city has neglected maintenance and safety issues at its parks for years.
“The ball associations and the softball groups have done phenomenal work in previous years building up and maintaining those parks,” she said. “But at some point, the city is going to have to recognize that they should be caring for their parks.”
Mount Vernon has a parks master plan that will help the city find the direction it wants to take with the ball fields, she said. There are some things that require immediate attention for safety reasons.
She said the city had a history of ignoring the parks. Since Keener started with the city council, it’s been slow to fine local partners and get people to realize the importance of the parks.
“We have not deeply invested in even maintenance of our parks in years,” she said.
The city council will hold a 30-minute committee meeting on Monday, April 24, to discuss the issues they’ve seen and to address questions that they have. Keener said hopefully they will be able to create a game plan for the parks.
She said the city needs to start looking at putting some elements from the parks master plan into the capital budget to get not just basic maintenance done, but also real improvements to the parks, which are in constant use.
“Unfortunately, our maintenance budget is tied in with everything else,” Keener said. “So part of what we’d like to do is separate park maintenance from just buildings maintenance.”
Community input from public meetings held in 2021 let the city know what residents want to see in the park. Keener said she’s kept a document that contains everything anyone mentioned at those meetings.
Keener said she began to set her own priorities after taking a tour of the parks shortly after she joined city council. She brought her children with her as she thought that would be the best safety check. The Hiawatha Park playground equipment was very old.
“It had these scary metal seesaws that really looked like they were out of a horror movie, and an old wooden structure that was not stable,” she said.
Those since have been removed. Now, Keener works on what she said will be a “very exciting new setup for Hiawatha Park.”
The parks have benches and playground equipment like swings in random places. And the restrooms need updating to be accessible. Memorial Park will have a new restroom that’s accessible, which she said was a step in the right direction.
“It’s a slow process because within our budget, there has never been a real focus on parks,” Keener said. “Money goes toward buildings and utilities, which it should. But parks are kind of very far, far down that list of priorities.”
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