Businesses help to improve city parks
WATERVLIET, N.Y. » City officials are pleased with the support from local businesses and community members for their efforts at improving parks within the city.
Residents living in the city recently started a Citizens Volunteer Committee to help make suggestions for ways to improve city parks and with the help of local businesses the city has been able to improve its parks little by little.
Councilman Charles Patricelli believes that work on the city parks are necessary to do since improvements haven’t been made to some of the parks in recent years.
“The parks seemed to have been neglected for a while and things needed to be addressed since it had been overlooked for a while,” said Patricelli.
Last week, Bonded Concrete donated some concrete to install some new spring rides in city parks for children to enjoy and other businesses and organizations have also stepped in to help.
“On that same trip, Bonded Concrete donated some more concrete to pour the foot-
ings for some new additions in our Veterans Park on 15th Street and 2nd Avenue,” Mayor Michael Manning pointed out during an interview Friday morning. “The new owners of the High Rise Apartments here across from City Hall, donated some money to the adjacent parks including the Veterans Park, with their donations we bought some new granite benches to replace the older wooden benches that were weathering.”
Manning also said that businesses like Streck’s Inc. also helped by donating six new flag poles to the city’s memorial in Veterans Park. He said that GE pitched in by donating some picnic tables for some of the parks. Manning noted that the city has invested some of its own funds to upgrade and improve some of the parks around the city as well.
“Now we will have a flag for each branch of the military and then a POW MIA Flag, so it’s a nice addition,” said Manning.
The city currently has around six recreational parks for youth to play at and they are hoping to continue to improve all of the parks throughout the year.
“I think we will be working on them throughout the summer since it is a work and progress project,” said Manning.
Manning and Patricelli believe that the community, businesses and city officials coming together to improve city parks is a beneficial and important thing for them to do.
“Well safety is number one, not upgrading and fixing things can become more of a problem and then to make them as useful as possible to give folks something to do there,” said Manning.
“Now that we finally got new equipment ordered and installed, it is a great thing for the kids and it’s nice that we’re making progress on this now,” said Patricelli.