(Seguin) — It’s been months since the Central Park Fountain was operational in downtown Seguin, but that’s about to change, thanks to action taken by the Seguin City Council on Tuesday. The council approved a deal that will allow the fountain to not only be repaired, but also be significantly enhanced.
Parks Director Jack Jones says staff members understand this fountain’s importance to the community. It was originally built back in the 1930s as a WPA project. It was reworked in 2007, but even those improvements need to be updated. Jones says the new work will bring the fountain back to its original glory.
“We are excited to bring the fountain back to life. It’s really cool. Back in February, unfortunately, we had a freeze and had a flood down there and our fail safe failed and here we are. But things happen for a reason and sometimes for a good reason. The fountain is 17-year-old as it is and most of the equipment is 17 years old down in the vault so it really was time to do not only repairs but a renovation — a remodel,” said Jones.
The fountain, when functioning, was a significant attraction to downtown Seguin.
But Jones says the fountain had lost some of its appeal even before it failed.
“If you recall over the past 17 years, the fountain has become static. Water comes up. It is not doing anything. Lights are there. They change colors sometimes. We are really fortunate that when the flood happened, we did get a nice insurance check for $77,000 and a mid-year budget adjustment that you approved in March/April was $100,000. We need a little more money than that as the next agenda item but this does really give us an opportunity to bring it back to life and have the fountain come up and down, move around, the lights, programming — we can program it instead of going downstairs and trying to figure stuff out, we can do it with our phones, internet, things like that. So, we are looking forward to doing this project,” said Jones.
The project will cost the city just over $200,000 to restore and remodel the fountain. It will include upgrades to nearly every part of the fountain, including new equipment to control the lighting and dancing water features.
“If you look at the proposal, it looks pretty simple, pretty basic but there is a lot of stuff that happens to make all this (work). It’s not just getting (the equipment). You’ve got to install it. You’ve got to wire it. A lot of the work is going to be 20 new lights. We are getting rid of the old lights. We want things to work together, to talk to each other and be programmed. The control panel, itself, is expensive to do a control panel that controls everything — that is expensive and the water chemistry. We (won’t) have the vapors that causes the corrosion down there (water pump area),” said Jones.
The fountain has been such a big part of downtown Seguin for nearly 90 years and Jones says even with the upgrades completed 17 years ago, this will be the first major remodel done for the city.
“We had a complete renovation of that fountain in 2007. We had a minor flood in 2017-2018 but we didn’t get near the insurance money and things need to change to where it is going to start singing and dancing again as I like to say,” said Jones.
The city says that the work on the fountain should start soon, and should be completed in the fall, just in time for the Holiday Stroll activities in downtown Seguin.