Graham parks board president provides park project updates

The Graham Parks and Recreation board president gave an update Thursday regarding the planned park improvement projects and grant applications to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. After getting an update from TPWD, Graham Parks and Wildlife board president Alex Heartfield said the phase one projects at Fireman’s Park could break ground in early 2023.

The city of Graham received $1.3 million from the Brazos River Authority for park improvement projects in June 2018. The funding was received for the Salt Creek Park project to turn the floodplain along Salt Creek into a park for the city with a waiver of liability to the BRA. Since then, the city has been attempting to obtain Recreational Trails and Local Park grants to help extend the scope of the projects using the funding from the BRA.

The city was awarded matching grant funding from TPWD in May 2021 after a decision was approved by the commission for the department. The funding was approved for two applications submitted by the city, one in the amount of $450,950 for a Local Parks grant and one in the amount of $200,000 for Recreational Trails grant. Heartfield said Thursday the city has moved forward with applying for the next stage of grants for the proposed projects.

“We’ve had a couple of meetings here recently with our architects, and they’re kind of helping us navigate through the process of the grant applications,” Heartfield said. “We have just submitted the grant application for phase two of the park. I know we haven’t started phase one yet, but the architects said that it’s better to go ahead and have the phase two funding application and not to skip a year because it puts us back at the bottom of the list. So we want to keep the project going as we can.”

Heartfield said when TPWD approved the phase one park application they used federal funds which required extra steps to be taken in order to disburse those funds awarded in 2021.

“Part of that extra step is that not only does the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department have to approve, but also the federal parks department (National Park Service) has to approve the project. The last part of that approval process is that it has to go before the Native American councils and that’s where it is right now. (...)  Once the Native American councils approve the park to go forward, then we can proceed with the efforts of phase one,” Heartfield said. “Our architects did hear from Texas Parks and Wildlife Department before our last meeting and said that they are expecting that approval to come in sometime this month. So, hopefully, if that is the case, they said that we can probably break ground on improvements right after the first of the year. We hope (...) but that’ll be a great thing for this community.”

For the full story, see the Wednesday, Aug. 10 edition of The Graham Leader.