ROTHBURY — The Rothbury village council didn’t make any final decisions, but discussed three different potential grants to pursue for a proposed refurbishing of Czarny Park at a special meeting Tuesday evening.
The council is considering applying for any one of three different Department of Natural Resources grants in hopes of sprucing up the park, located next to the vacant school building on Winston Road, and attracting visitors to the area. The three grants would be for varying amounts of money, so three different plans were drawn up.
The most expensive plan for the park costs nearly $1 million to enact, which would be partially defrayed if the village is able to get a $400,000 grant from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund. However, trustee Denise Kurdziel said even with that grant, the $589,000 remaining balance would represent 38% of the village’s yearly revenue. The plan would include paving the parking lot, a refurbishing of the baseball field and a multi-purpose court, a restroom and septic system, and two playgrounds. Through discussion, the council decided it was not necessary to fully pave the parking lot, reasoning a gravel parking lot would be easier to expand if it came to it, and also reduced the two playgrounds to one.
Two other plans were less intensive. A $719,000 plan would be defrayed by a $358,000 MNRTF grant and would not include a restroom building or the multi-purpose court, and a third plan the council described as “just the nuts and bolts” would cost $316,000 and only focus on the refurbishing of the baseball field. The costs for those respective plans, Kurdziel said, would be 23% and 16% of the village’s annual revenue (11% for the latter if spread over three years), a more manageable figure that allows easier budgeting for other areas in the village.
The plans as presented would not begin to be enacted until 2025, but the council is discussing them now because there is an April 1 deadline to apply for the DNR grants and it must commit money up front to be eligible. The council wanted to weigh its options prior to making a decision at the March 20 council meeting.
Trustee Troy Voorhees raised the question of whether the council could pursue a less lucrative grant while still working on the full version of its plan and later pursue larger grants, but the consensus was such a plan would be risky. Kurdziel did say that even if the village did not receive any grant money, committing some money in advance wouldn’t be a negative because it could then use the money to do the improvements themselves. The improvements wouldn’t necessarily be as expensive as in the plans presented Tuesday in that case, the council said, because it wouldn’t have to follow all the same procedures required by DNR grants.
