The weather isn’t being cooperative, but still, the upcoming Memorial Day weekend is the kick-off to summer—for the Snyderville Recreation District and many others.
District Director Brian Hanton discussed some of their summer plans, in addition to some long-range items.
Hanton noted that the splash pad at the Basin Fieldhouse will be open on Friday.
“Hopefully it’s not an ice pad but yeah we're opening up our summer operations are starting to kick off. Usually Memorial Day is when we open up our splash pad, so that's a free thing for anybody in the community. It's open from 11:00 AM until 7:00 so we try to wait for it to get a little bit warmer. It is heated water even though some people don't think so, but we do recycle the water and we heat it up. Later in the day it doesn't quite seem that way but the 24th Friday we’ll have that opened and people come out and play with that. The pool, on our website we have the specific hours. Different days they’re different hours. So, Monday and Wednesday are different from Tuesday and Thursday. Once school gets out, we’ll have it open more, but we're just waiting for the lifeguards.”
Coming up on June 1st is National Trails Day, and they’re asking citizens to help them out on some park improvements.
“At 8:30 come out to Trailside Park and we’re going to do some work around the park. There's a fence can be put up. We're working on a new learn to ride loop in the bike park. So, a couple of different projects that we would love volunteers to come and help with and kind of get to meet our crews too. I mean it's a good opportunity to see the people that are out doing the work all summer and work alongside them and put some sweat equity into what we have going on out there.” Hanton explained there are fences in certain areas but they’re looking to extend the fence by the bike park. “People have been riding down from the bike park through the native onto the skate park around the basketball court we're having some damage done to those amenities. So, we're looking to kind of block that of and make people have to take a different route to get there.”
On some other items, the deadline for citizens to respond to their Community Recreation Survey is midnight on the 22nd, Wednesday.
Among other things, Hanton said the survey will help them plan for the 100-acre park in Silver Creek Village. The District is also undertaking a Facility Demand Study, in cooperation with Zion’s Bank, to see how they compare with other communities.
“Then from there, we’ll review our strategic action plan with hopes that we’ll be able to start laying out that park. We're pretty excited about it. I know we've had it a while and we want to get going. I know the building; the housing development is going to start happening over there this summer. So, we're hoping that we can get in shortly after and at least have the plan by the end of this year beginning of next year and then getting started. A lot of it depends financially, if it requires a bond where we look with that. Just seeing if we can knock off some of the low hanging fruit. Maybe putting some playing fields and playgrounds and those types of things before we do the big money items.”
Finally, he said that the District has roughly $13 million remaining to them in Open Space funding.
“We’re in the process of working with Gilmor parcel and if that goes through that will definitely take it down a little bit. That will leave us, in open space, about $3.5. We've been working with the BOSC, basin open space committee, and just trying to recognize any other potential open space opportunities to preserve. So with $3.5 it might be tough to get something, but we hope that we can figure out that. There is still some money for, we had set aside it's a recreational funds at 2.5 million that is kind of been earmarked for the ice rink. We've been working with the city and the Black Rock development with hopes that they do something that we can collaborate with and save the community some dollars to not have to build a $25 million additional sheet of ice.”
