Wilmington Parks and Recreation board discusses next steps at Greenville Loop Road park

WILMINGTON,NC (WWAY-TV) – The city of Wilmington’s Park and Recreation advisory board is discussing next steps for a new 25-acre park on Greenville Loop Road.

The city, county and New Hanover Community Endowment will commit more than $9 million for the park.

“There was another contingency to receiving the grant that there be a very transparent and robust public engagement period,” said Amy Beatty, director of parks and recreation.

The city will kick off the development of the park with a “design charrette” in other words, an open invite for everybody in the community to bring together their ideas for the future of this park.

“This is not just the city and the county determining what will be there it will be citizens ultimately that will tell us what they would really like to see there,” said Mayor Bill Saffo.

The city will invite landscape architects, engineers, and other design consultants.

The city will also advertise a request for qualifications of a design architect based off this public input and concept plan. Beatty said the agreement with the county and Endowment stipulates the park would need to be developed within five years.

“We envision the design process from the very beginning of public engagement to the end of design and being ready to present a design to city council to last approximately a year,” Beatty said.

Some advisory members worry for the location of the park which is located on a floodplain.

“It’s just awful close to the water, I would be, as a taxpayer, concerned about a lot of money being spent on stuff that’s just going to get washed away in the next flood,” a board member said.

The city recently cut the ribbon on new upgrades at Olsen Park and Saffo said they will be addressing recent concerns of “declining conditions” at Greenfield Park.

“We need to do some stuff around Greenfield Lake that is a prestigious, used to be the most prestigious park in the entire region and I know that we are going to be talking about a lot this during our budget process,” said Saffo.