Seguin Daily News: Work set to begin on new public parks master plan in Seguin

Seguin Daily News: Work set to begin on new public parks master plan in Seguin Main Photo

21 Jun 2019


City Planning Department

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today, Darren Dunn 

The city of Seguin is ready to get started with its plans to create a new parks and recreation master plan for the community. The city council on Tuesday approved a $100,000 contract with Stantec Consulting Services, which will handle the development of the plan.

Parks Director Jack Jones introduced Stantec Consulting to the council during a meeting earlier this month, when the firm was chosen as the top candidate for the work. Jones says they were quickly able to hammer out the details of the contract, which is good news for the city. He says it will allow the firm to start reaching out the community soon.

“It has everything in there that we need to have a comprehensive parks and recreation trails and open space master plan. We are excited to get started. The reason that it came back so fast is because they did everything we wanted. It was pretty simple to do the contract and get the scope of services going and we also want to get feedback from the public. We’ve got some big events coming up, concerts in the park — Patriotic Concert — they want to hit that — get feedback from the community, the Fourth of July Parade of course, the Fireworks Show, Freedom Fiesta as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities over the next two weeks to really hit, to survey, get out the word about what we are doing and get input from the public,” said Jones.

One of the benefits that Stantec Consulting Services offers is that the lead on the project is a Seguin native. Mark Maldonado is a Seguinite, who’s family owns Maldonado’s Nursery. Maldonado says they want to use the busy Fourth of July period in Seguin to collect data from the community and try to figure out what kinds of things do people want from the parks system in the future.

“We have a couple of options and this is where the creativity side meets the public engagment and public outreach side. For exasmple, one of the ideas that were brainstorming was for the Fourth of July Parade and come out early in the morning, hand out water with a sticker of the QR code that we can send to the survey. They get a free water while they wait for the parade but at the same time, they can access our survey and start asking some park questions, getting some feedback while they are waiting for the parade to start. Concerts in the Park or Freedom Fiesta having a booth there with maybe some boards and start getting some feedback from local residents for specific community needs in their back yard to say where would you like to see a park or where would you want to see trails and start getting feedback that way. So, the main thing was that we wanted to come early to try to capitalize on some of these events that are coming up since there’s are a couple where the whole community comes together and we felt the timing to present this was perfect,” said Maldonado.

Once the work gets started Maldonado says that it should take approximately six to nine months to develop a new parks master plan for the city.

 

To view the original story at seguintoday.com and fromSeguin Daily News, please click here.