By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
As of Tuesday, the City of Glasgow is advertising for bids on the demolition work on existing structures and components within American Legion Park.
The work will make way for a mostly redesigned park that is expected to have an aquatic center and camp and meeting rooms in the area where the ballfield is now, pickleball courts, and more. While much of the work is slated for the first phase, other elements are expected to be added later.
Pat Hoagland, a consultant with Brandstetter Carroll, which developed the plan for the park, brought the latest rendering of the design as well as a budget on Monday to a special meeting of the Glasgow Common Council Planning and Development Committee, more commonly known as the Parks and Recreation Committee, and he discussed upcoming timeline points that included the anticipated advertisement of bids on Tuesday.
Those bids are to be opened on April 11, he said.
The plan is then to advertise for bids May 15 on Phase 1 construction throughout the park, have a prebid meeting June 4, and then open those bids June 18, Hoagland said.
“We don’t have enough money to do everything in the whole park,” he said after confirming those bids would just be for Phase 1, but he reviewed what all the elements would be upon final completion. In the southwest corner of the park, at the top of the hill, a new shelter and bathrooms are to replace the current shelter; the playground would remain in same general vicinity; and the sole entrance and exit driveway goes down the hill from that west side of the parking area to roughly where the summer camp building is now – an area that is intended to have a full basketball and playground along with a smallish parking area. At that point, the driveway curves toward the eastern side of the park and meets up with the existing driveway near where the military tank is now and continues to the exit location at Ky. 90. The driveway loop that is currently at the eastern side of the park with the two small picnic shelters within it is to become a pedestrian trail that winds over to and around the basketball court and up the hill along the far western edge and connects to the aquatic center parking lot, which is roughly where the current parking at the top of the hill is now.
The “front” or northern end of the park at the location of the current swimming pool – which, to be clear, will not be open for the 2024 summer season as it is among the things to be demolished – is expected to have four pickleball courts, an outdoor fitness area, a large shelter, a dog park that would also have a smaller shelter within it, and restrooms.
Where there had been a camp room and a separate meeting room in a prior design, Hoagland said those have been consolidated to be the same space now. As they reconfigured part of the trails, everything is at a 5 percent slope that is “accessible” by wheelchair, he said.
A tentative location is marked for a trail leading off the property over the Barren County Family YMCA as well.
“That can be somewhere else,” Hoagland said. “We need to work with the Y to see where that might go.”
The disc golf course still has to be rearranged, he said.
The earthwork for the entire park as well as utility positioning for the whole park would be included in that phase, plus the aquatic center, the pickleball courts, the bathrooms and the trail, Hoagland said.
The dog park, outdoor fitness area, shelters and basketball court would be the components that come later, he said.
His estimated costs for the demolition total roughly $250,000 and the Phase 1 work is estimated at roughly $10 million. The estimate for the future work was at roughly $1.1 million.
Councilman Patrick Gaunce asked about what the plan is for the military tank, and Mayor Henry Royse said he has finally been able to learn that it is under the purview of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and has been in contact with someone in Detroit who had told him that someone from the military would come to remove the tank and take it elsewhere. The future location had not been determined or disclosed at this point, he said.
“We just now got that far,” the mayor said.
Gaunce also asked about the timing of completion, and Hoagland said the aquatic center may not be ready by Memorial Day of next year, but he did anticipate that it could be open before the end of summer 2025, and the pickleball courts could be open earlier.
The name of the park itself wouldn’t change, but the idea of naming sponsorships for various individual park components was also discussed, not for the first time, for a while.
Eddie Furlong, director of the Parks and Recreation Department, said he thought that was something they could start looking at more earnestly now that they’re at the “door of demo.”
He had already proposed that the aquatic center – or at least some part of it – should be named for Joyce Driver, who worked at the city pool for 42 years before retiring.
Royse said he’ll be meeting with state transportation officials later in the week and wanted to know whether this design was final enough to show them with regard for any considerations they would have for the plan to widen Ky. 90, that stretch of which is also known as Happy Valley Road.
Hoagland and Furlong said they believe it’s at that point, and Furlong said that the grassy area between the pool and the road has all the major utilities running along it, so even if they wanted to add road width there, it would require moving all those.
Hoagland added that the pickleball fence is a little farther back from the road compared with where the pool fence is now, so that would free up a little more space should they need it.
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