June's Park Board meeing

The Park Board and Corporation met on Monday night at Iroquois Park. Because the old Monnett building is now privately owned, Park meetings can no longer be held there. The group decided to meet in the picnic shelter rather than in the headquarters building.

The Park Superintendent noted that the LaRue Pool had opened a week later than intended because water had gotten into a conduit with electrical wires and that problem  had to be fixed. The pool should be open until school starts and maybe a weekend or two after that. The pool will celebrate its 70th anniversary next year--I wonder how many municipal pools are older than that.

Most of the meeting was directly or indirectly focused on planned fundraising for park improvements. The fundraising is being financed by the Blacker Trust. The goal is to raise over a million dollars, but the number keeps changing. The fund raisers do not want the Park Board or Corporation to start any projects until this fundraising has been completed and members of the Park Board had problems with that. The City received almost $90K from the sale of the Monnett building and there is fear that the money will be used for non-park purposes if the Park does not move to use the money. The group decided to get an estimate of what it would cost to put a trail around the perimeter of the Monnett and Staddon Field parcel.

The fundraising people seem to be focused on baseball fields in Brookside Park. There is room for at least two fields in the area west of the tennis courts. The preliminary plans that the fundraisers had drawn up increased parking by demolishing the J C Cruiser Shelter and the Park Board was unanimous in condemning this idea.

The money raised will go to an account with the Jasper Foundation. Exactly who will control that money is not clear to me.

Mainstreet Rensselaer is planning a trail from the corner of Milroy Park by Busy Bee to the south corner of the park.

The next Park Board meeting is scheduled for July 17.

In other bits and pieces, I noticed that a lot of the ash trees at SJC in the grove along the highway are dead or dying. Do not plant ash trees.

I had not visited the apartments at the north end of Elza lately and was surprised today to notice that a foundation is in for another ten-unit  building. The first building still needs finishing touches.