Grants fund park projects

POTTSTOWN » With summer in full swing, the borough’s parks are getting plenty of use, both by individuals and for the many events planned throughout the year.

Thanks to a series of grants obtained over the past two years, the borough is now embarking on more than $190,000 worth of improvements to three parks — Riverfront Park, Memorial Park and Pollack Park.

The two most recent grants awarded to Pottstown come from two different sources for projects at two different parks.

PECO energy was on hand at Aug. 9’s workshop meeting to provide a $10,000 “Green Region” grant to the borough to help pay for a new picnic pavilion in 30-acre Riverfront Park.

That funding will be matched by another $10,000 “minigrant,” this time through the funding administered by the Pottstown Metropolitan Regional Recreation Committee and funded equally by the Pottstown Area Health and Wellness Foundation and the Penn-

sylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, according to information provided by Justin Keller, the assistant borough manager.

Add in another $2,500 from the Schuylkill River Heritage Area, whose headquarters is located in Riverfront Park, and you have a picnic pavilion at no cost to local taxpayers.

Also announced is a $30,000 grant from the National Recreation and Park Association and The Walt Disney Co. — one of only 25 issued in the nation and the only one awarded in Pennsylvania.

This grant will pay for a “nature-based play area” in 78-acre Memorial Park that features natural play structures like large boulders, stumps and logs, Keller told council.

A workshop with 30 camp children was held Aug. 9 at the former Edgewood Elementary School to get input, according to Michael Lane, the regional recreation coordinator who helped to secure the grant, and another community open house will be announced at some point in the near future.

Work must begin by October and be completed by April, according to Keller.

The timing could not be better given the announcement Borough Manager Mark Flanders made Aug. 9 — that the existing playground equipment near the Fountain of Youth Spray Park in Memorial Park will be removed at the end of the summer.

“Parks and Recreation staff have identified some safety issues with the equipment and at the end of the summer, when the kids are back in school, it will be cut down,” he said.

There is funding in place to replace it, but that may not be until the third quarter of 2018, he said.

But with the timely installation of the natural playground “the impact on the community should be minimal,” Flanders said.

The funding that’s in place to replace the traditional play equipment includes a $35,000 grant from the Pottstown Area Health and Wellness Foundation, secured in 2015. The Disney grant serves as a match for that money and Memorial Park will soon be home to two new playgrounds for a local cost to borough taxpayers of only $5,000, said Keller.

Lane also briefed council in April on a $70,000 grant application that has been submitted to the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to improve handicapped access and parking near the spray park in Memorial Park.

The plan calls for an handicapped accessible trail to the play equipment from an improved parking lot, improved landscaping, grills, benches and picnic tables. Lane said word on the grant funding is expected in October.

A second grant application with Department of Community and Economic Development would pay for taking out the unused tennis courts, improving and expanding the auxiliary parking in the back of that section of the park as well as installing a rain garden for stormwater control.

Decisions on that round of grants will be announced in May, Lane said.

Also related to Memorial Park is an $80,000 grant from the Montgomery County 2040 program for the construction of a pedestrian crossing on King Street between the park’s main entrance and the entrance to the Carousel at Pottstown and Manatawny Green mini-golf facility.

That project is currently in the engineering phase and, when complete, will help to tie together the tourism and recreation district which also includes the Trilogy Park BMX and skateboard facilities, the Pottstown stop of the Colebrookdale Railroad’s Secret Valley Line, Pottsgrove Manor historic site as well as providing a safer connection to Riverfront Park and the Schuylkill River trail through the Montgomery County Community College property.

And last but not least, three-quarters of the work is now complete on a new master site plan for quarter-acre Pollock Park, which was funded by a $25,000 grant in 2016 through the same mini-grant program administered by the Pottstown Regional Recreation Committee and funded in equal parts by the Health and Wellness Foundation and DCNR.