The city of Maple Valley is aiming to put a parks and recreation bond measure out to voters on the April 2016 special election ballot.
It would be the first voter-approved bond the city has put on a ballot in its 18-year history.
A definite bond amount hasn’t been officially set, but the City Council reached consensus Monday that the $20 million mark the Parks and Recreation Commission recommended is a good amount to stay around.
A $20 million bond would result in an increase to property taxes of about $182 for the year on a home with an assessed value of $385,000 – the average for the city.
The projects in the commission’s recommended bond include $5 million in improvements to Lake Wilderness Park, $10 million to develop Summit Park, $5 million for land acquisition and park development, and $1 million for improvements and maintenance to the Lake Wilderness Golf Course. That total equals about $21 million, but some of those numbers are rough estimations, the commission said.
The City Council gave the commission the go-ahead to dig deeper into exactly how much each of these projects will cost so that a more definitive number can be reached.
Parks and Recreation Director Greg Brown said he and his staff will immediately start the process to redo the master plan of Summit Park, which will include soliciting input from the public and the school district.
The master plan for Summit Park has to be reconfigured because in October of last year, the city sold about 8 acres of the park property to the school district for them to build an additional parking lot and a bus route for the new high school that will be constructed east of Summit Park.
In addition, vice chair of the commission, Dave Sanderson, has indicated on several occasions his desire to put a dog park on the lower two acres of the property, or what is referred to as “the handle” or “the peninsula” of the property.
Something else that will be started immediately is the process for a feasibility study on a potential recreation center. That cost, about $60,000, is already included in this year’s budget and won’t need to be included on the bond.
The land acquisition part of the bond could include purchasing approximately 15 acres of the back nine of the former Elk Run Golf Course for a park. Alternatively, Brown said, the owners have indicated they might be interested in providing an easement throughout the property to allow for public use on the already-existing cart paths. This would help fill a gap in park services on the southwest end of town, Brown said.
A different funding source the commission talked about was potentially selling one of the city’s six undeveloped park properties to pay for other, more easily developable land within the city, like a portion of Elk Run.
