(Seguin) — The city of Seguin has a new road map in place that will help it expand and improve the city’s parks system. The Seguin City Council on Tuesday approved the adoption of the Parks, Recreation, Open Space and Trails Master Plan. The plan was developed by Stantec Consulting Services. The firm was hired by the city last year to work with staff and the community to develop a comprehensive plan for the parks system.
The project was lead by Mark Maldonado, a Seguin native who works for Stantec. Maldonado told the council that this was a great project to work on, and he was thrilled with the overall results.
“It’s been an exciting eight or nine months for us. Being back in my home town and having the public involvement in this process has been a really gratifying experience for us, and exciting at that.
Maldonado says it was community input was vital to coming up with a plan that would serve the city well for years to come. He says the response to the master plan survey was amazing, and it allowed them to focus on some key goals in the plan.
“In the parks master plan, we kind of outlined nine different goals. I won’t go into these goals in detail, but I will just kind of hit them high level. These goals deal with level of service, facilities, recreation, economic impact, improvements and maintenance, regional context, connectivity, health and environment, and then funding and resources,” said Maldonado.
The plan also lays out some specific park improvement ideas, including major upgrades to Max Starcke Park, Manuel Castilla Park and the creation of a new community park in the open field that currently sits next to the old Juan Seguin campus. He says it also calls for the construction of a natatorium and the addition of more trails in the city.
“All in all our recommendations kind of get summed up into the Big 5, or five major categories. And these categories are, number 1 land acquisition for new parks and facilities. Number two, improvements to existing parks and recreational facilities. Number three, expand and create additional recreation programming. Number four, develop a recreational center (with) indoor/outdoor aquatics. And number five, develop additional trail and trail connections. So in each one of these categories, you’ll see a number of recommendations and action items that we are proposing. Along with some cool graphics that can give you an idea for funding strategies for opportunities that you can pursue grants — that you can pursue with local partnerships and the private sector to see if you can get those areas developed through fund raising as well,” said Maldonado.
The park improvements would take millions of dollars to complete, but Maldonado says these are worthy investments to make into the city. He says Stantec also identified in the plan ways for the city to find potential funding opportunities for each project.
“We’ve included two kind of unique chapters to this plan that you don’t really see anywhere else. And one of them is a chapter on economic development and how parks and trails really contribute to economic development. The second is the funding strategies, specific for the demographics, the size and the recommendations for Seguin. So out of that, you’ll see a number of pages. I think it’s six or eight pages of funding strategies and tables that our grant writing team has put together specifically for Seguin — with the contacts, the deadlines, the websites, and all of that stuff — to make it easy for this plan to really hit the ground running and for us to see the implementation phase of this plan come to life,” said Maldonado.
A copy of the parks master plan can be found online at seguintoday.com.