Parks Department: What Should We Do with 100-Acre Property?

St. Charles residents will soon have an opportunity to tell officials what they’d like to see in the 100-acre park in northeast St. Charles.
The city’s parks and recreation department has hired
Officials will seek public input for the plan at the first of three meetings to begin in the next month to six weeks.

How Big is the Park?
But before the master plan is undertaken, Bax Engineering will survey the property and determine its boundaries.
St. Charles County donated the tract—located north of The Boeing Co. and between Highway 94 North, Hawning Road and the River Road—to the city in 2000 after it acquired the land from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA bought out three mobile home parks there following major floods in 1993 and 1995 and gave it to the county.
But officials are not sure exactly how many acres the site has.
“We know there’s anywhere from 100 to 113 acres is what we’ve heard,” Maralee Britton, director of the Parks and Recreation Department, said. “We want (to know) the exact boundaries. We want clear points to say this is the property we are developing.”
“We just need to make sure we’re not trying to design and develop areas that are not ours,” Britton said.

Public Meetings To Start in Four to Six Weeks
Jacobs will then hold a series of public meetings to develop a master plan for the site. The first will be designed to gain input from residents and visitors about how they would like to see the site developed.
She noted that some residents have already suggested they’d like to see athletic fields, an area for Frisbee golf and a BMX dirt track for bicycles in the park. Others have suggested part of the site be developed as festival area to take pressure off of Frontier Park.
A comprehensive plan for all the city’s parks done a couple of years showed a need for and interest in soccer fields, shelters and Frisbee golf, Britton said. 

“We had a wide range of comments on what the property could be used for,” she said. “Frisbee golf is something we’ve heard a lot about since we don’t have any (facilities for it), and that’s a popular sport.”
Jacobs, with input from the park staff, will then start putting together different layouts and designs together using the initial feedback.  
Then officials will schedule another meeting “to show the public what we have come up with and we’ll look at tweaking the plan from there,” Britton said.
At the last of the three meetings, the final master plan will be unveiled.
The process for developing the master plan has a 20-week work schedule, Britton said. Residents can expect the public meetings to begin in the next month to six weeks.
“By the end of the 20 weeks we’ll have a completed document saying this is the direction the public has said they would like for us to go,” she said.
“We’ll be able to say, ‘This is our master plan, these are the goals we want to accomplish, these are out cost estimates of what it is going to take to accomplish the goals and then it is up to us to take that and move forward and start the development.’”
Any development of the park will take into consideration the fact that a large section of the tract is in the floodway and sections of it are in the flood plain, Britton said.
The plan will also take into consideration that the tract borders private property on three sides, she added.
If part of the tract is developed into an area for special events, roads may “have to be accommodated to meet that need,” Britton said.