City of Mountain Home officials Tuesday night unveiled plans for an all-access playground that would be installed at Hickory Park. The new equipment would allow children of all abilities to play at the park.
The city is applying for a grant from the Arkansas Parks Department to help fund the playground’s construction. If approved for the grant, the City of Mountain Home would receive $250,000 from the state for the project and would be required to match $250,000 with in-kind labor, its own funds or a combination of the two.
Conceptual drawings rendered by ETC Engineers at Architects of Little Rock handed out at Tuesday’s meeting indicate the all-access playground would be built to the west of the Hickory Park park tennis courts. The playground project would also include rebuilding the parks’ restrooms. Future plans for Hickory Park include adding a parking lot accessible from Dyer Street to the north of the all-access playground and renovating the park’s existing baseball field into an all-access baseball diamond.
The deadline to apply for the Arkansas Parks grant is Aug. 27. If the city’s application is well received, officials may be invited to make a presentation to the Arkansas Parks and Recreation committee overseeing the grant applications. The city would most likely learn if it was being awarded a grant in December.
The city has not began work on the playground because it cannot get credit for any work done on the project until the grant is approved by the state. If they city was awarded the grant in December, Mountain Home Parks Director Billy D. Austin said he believed work could begin in January.
“There’s a lot that can be done on the site from the city’s end,” Austin says.
In March, Mountain Home voters approved two sales tax proposals to renovate the city’s park system and build a community center/aquatic facility. Offering an all-access playground was one of the items included in that master list of planned improvements.
Those sales-tax proposals will go into effect in July, and the city will begin receiving revenue from them in September.
Should the city fail to secure the grant for the playground, it could opt to pay for the entire project out-of-pocket with that sales-tax money.
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