The Marshall County Park Foundation is working toward future development in Mike Miller Park.
The Park Foundation met Wednesday with representatives of Bacon, Farmer and Workman Engineering of Paducah to kick off the effort to develop a master plan for the park, on which the county will work on long term plans to complete. The initiative is still in its infancy, but when complete should give the foundation a road map to realizing its vision.
“The whole purpose for this meeting is for us to start gathering what you guys envision the overall picture of the park would look like,” said Jonathan Perkins, landscape architect with BFW. “Thinking about what you already have and then filling in the gaps with the new property, and anything associated with that.”
Marshall County Judge-Executive Kevin Neal said he and Parks Director Dennis Foust had discussed the best ways to utilize the space to meet county needs. Neal said he and Foust determined it would be best to put together a steering committee composed of county residents to gain input from the community on those uses.
“That way we can also hear back from the citizens of the community,” Neal said. “That’s to help us kind of put together what one ideas and vision the community has and how we can make that fit in our budget and resources.”
Foust intends to put together a seven- to 10-member panel to look into the park and community’s greatest needs. Members, he said, would ideally be representatives of local agencies that use the park.
“We all have a general idea of things we’d like to see, and obviously we’re going to want community input,” Foust said. “But in terms of how to go about doing this, I think we need people like – I need a soccer person, I need a baseball/softball person … we need somebody from the arts community, if you will, walking trail … you know, somebody who would be interested in an amphitheater. And also, we need it geographically diverse throughout the county. We need people from various sections of the county. Now, having said that, we don’t want to have a group that is so cumbersome that we can’t work.”
Foust said he would work to come up with potential residents for the committee and provide those names to members of the Park Foundation – which include each of the county’s three district commissioners, Neal and Foust – during the board’s Oct. 3 meeting.
The foundation discussed preliminary ideas and suggestions received prior to Wednesday’s meeting to consider, including potential construction of an amphitheater, better lighting on walking trails and pickle ball courts.
The master plan will focus on development of an additional 46 acres adjacent to the park that the county acquired in 2016 to expand the 80-acre park and its offerings. Ultimately, Foust said in a later interview, development on the new plot in conjunction with the new would be a long term project taken in phases. No project estimates or budget had been set as of Wednesday.
“What I don’t want to do is haphazardly do something,” Foust said. “Yeah, OK, (say) we want to put in whether it be a soccer field, a baseball field, a softball field, pickle ball courts or whatever. I don’t want to put something someplace, and then, say, a year later, ‘Oh, why did we do that? We could have used that for something else.’ So, what we’re looking at is just coming up with a future plan, looking ahead. We don’t really have a direct pool of money right now that we’re going to be able to develop anything.”
Foust said the foundation would develop that plan based on community wants and needs, and then be able to prioritize and construct slowly.
“Hopefully the whole idea is that we can make intelligent decisions about what we do in terms of park expansion,” Foust said. “It may be that it’s five years before we can do anything, but there will be some of these things that won’t have a great deal of cost. … But major projects, obviously, if we say, ‘Hey, this is something we want to shoot for,’ then we have to figure out how to finance it.”
Perkins outlined a schedule of about seven meetings for the foundation and the committee to nail down the overall concept and vision of the expansion project. Those meetings would ideally begin with an inventory and analyses review, and would include two public input forums in addition to design and cost reviews before final presentation to the fiscal court.