Henry Schuette Park in Manitowoc is going to have some renovations, and not all citizens are happy about the initial plans.
This park has been around for over 20 years in its current state, and it has recently been showing signs of aging, making the renovations necessary to ensure the safety of everyone who wants to use the park.
The city sent out a survey before they started any work on the park to see what the citizens wanted done with the area to make it better.
April Backus was one of the citizens who took the survey, and she isn’t happy with how their suggestions were taken.
“Over the last few days, the city had posted their new plans for Schuette Park, and it basically went against everything that people agreed upon in the survey, ” she told SeehaferNews.com.
April put together a petition and a Facebook group called Save Henry Schuette Park, where she and others are signing to get the city to reconsider its current plans.
April Backus and her son Payton
“I understand that the park has to be redone, I’m not trying to advocate for the park to not be redone,” she explained. “It’s just in the manner of which its being redone that I think we need to change.”
Mayor Justin Nickels has seen this criticism and urges citizens to remember that this project will take years to complete, and no plans are final.
“Even though there’s concepts out there, ideas out there that may have shown less playground equipment doesn’t mean that’s what it’s going to be at the end of the day,” the Mayor noted. “If the community said, ‘No, we really want it to be a larger playground,’ that’s what we’ll look into doing.”
He knows that this park is a huge part of what makes Manitowoc great, and he wants to make sure that the new park is still something that makes Manitowoc special.
“We still want it to be a destination park, not just a neighborhood park where you have a swing set and a slide,” Mayor Nickels reiterated. “We want it to be larger and bigger and more because that’s what we have now, something a little larger than life.”
When looking at the new plans, April’s main issue was that the emphasis didn’t seem to be on the playground equipment.
“The main focus of the park, it looks like a lot of cement, a lot of pavilion areas,” she said bluntly. “The playground looked very scarce with just a few scattered pieces of playground equipment that aren’t really interactive for children.”
She also says that many other neighboring cities have splashpads at their parks, while Manitowoc doesn’t.
Despite this, Mayor Nickels has a couple of reasons as to why a splash pad might not be the best fit for our community.
Mayor Justin Nickels
“We’ve talked about splash pads in other parks. We’ve never really done it because we have the Aquatic Center. We want to encourage people to use the aquatic center. We have a lake. We want to encourage people to use the lake,” he explained. “Splash pads are very expensive to maintain, but that doesn’t mean that we’re saying absolutely no to a splash pad at Schuette Park. If that’s what people want in that neighborhood, especially in that area, sure, we can make it work. We can make anything work.”
Safety is also a big concern for both parties.
April says that she didn’t see very many safety precautions being taken in the new plans.
“There was no fencing, which is a huge thing of why everyone loves Schuette Park,” she noted. “Even when my kids were little, it was the only park I went to because it was fenced in and it had a one-way in and out and it was, it felt safer, and that is not a part of those plans.”
Mayor Nickels says safety is always on park planners’ minds.
“There will be surveillance, there will be security,” he assured the community. “We’ve done that at several other parks, put on locks on the restroom doors at night, we’ve hired park rangers that go out overnight to check all of our parks now, so yes, I mean we put millions of dollars into something, we’re going to make sure it’s secure and safe.”
April’s final concern is about how the current park and nearby trails are being maintained.
“The trails that go from Upper Schuette Park to Lower Schuette Park, like the trails that go through the woods, haven’t been upkept either,” she noted. “That was something that was important to them, that going forward, it’s a good thing to think about.”
Mayor Nickels agrees that the maintenance hasn’t been up to par and that a new park entirely is needed to get the area back in shape.
“We could stick a lot of time and money into making it perfect, but it’s not going to last forever either,” he explained. “That’s why we’re at this point, if we know something else is coming, we’re not going to maintain it to the full hundred percent because it’s not going to live long enough to get that.”
Both Apil Backus and Mayor Nickels want this park to be a safe and fun place where children and families can go to have fun.
