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Fair Park in Canfield may get splash pad
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
The city park board voted 4-1 Monday to recommend to city council the creation of a splash pad for Fair Park on Oak Street.
City resident Courtney Larson has taken up the project over recent months and has spoken at Canfield Council and Canfield Park Board meetings in recent weeks.
Park board member John Craig voted against the splash pad, which would be built three times bigger than the one in Austintown Park, 6000 Kirk Road. Splash pads shoot and spray water from above-ground sprinklers with little to no standing water. They are designed for children.
“After a year or two, the maintenance and upkeep just wears on the park board’s budget and/or the city’s [budget]. And we’d have this facility, instead of working, it would be shut down and can’t use it because of lack of funds,” Craig explained.
Larson addressed that concern by saying her group wants to raise more than $200,000, overshooting a project estimate of $150,000, to provide the city with water and maintenance funds for the first few years of operation.
The park board recommended the creation of a splash pad with fresh water, which would cost approximately $1,800 to $2,400 a month for water. There was an option of recirculating the water, but that was not pursued after health concerns. The park board also recommended the creation of an earmarked city fund for the project. Both recommendations will be before the Canfield Council, which meets only once this month, Aug. 12.
“We were informed that the [recirculated] water would become a health liability issue” and treated as its own water system, said John Whitehouse, park board member.
That recirculated water system would have to be approved by the state health department and the Mahoning County District Board of Health along with annual inspections. The fresh water does not need those requirements as it comes out and then goes down the drain.
The Canfield splash pad will need chlorine tablets to be used to treat runoff water. Splash pads can have built-in timers, so a child on it can press a button every few minutes while playing to keep the water from shutting off.
Larson has proposed a 1,500-square-foot playground with a maximum capacity of between 75 and 80 people to have 11 above-ground features and eight flush-mount features. It will be at Fair Park with a concrete border around the pad with drains and be in a fenced-in area. By comparison, Austintown’s splash pad is 520 square feet with a maximum capacity between 25 and 30 people and operates from noon to 7 p.m. from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
The fenced-in area could allow for the pad to be rented out for private parties.
“I am really excited. This means we can definitely start the fundraising process,” Larson said Monday.
She no longer is pursuing a nonprofit status and is seeking the city to establish an earmarked fund for the splash pad. City council previously has done this, specifically with a Greasel Park project, and is researching to see if state laws have changed since that work.
Larson said the city earmarked fund would “streamline the entire process and make any donors feel confident about the money going directly to the city.”
She first talked about that possibility at the July 15 Canfield Council meeting. “I’ll start digging into this in terms of liability, insurance issues, what the waiver that everyone is going to sign will look like. Things like that,” said Atty. Mark Fortunato, city attorney, at that time.