By: Tim Kays
As recently reported, the Village of Archbold is well underway in the planning, development and funding for a $450,000 splash pad in Ruihley Park. The Village of Fayette is attempting to undertake the same type of project, albeit is a smaller scale.
The Fayette splash pad project is still in its early infancy by comparison, with only one bid received for the project, no accepted design layouts, and lines of funding still being navigated.
While Archbold had an early jump on their project, for all practical purposes Fayette is still awaiting the starter’s gun. “We’re not that close, yet,” said Village Administrator Genna Biddix. “The Capital Bill funds, I’m still working on getting them.”
“Basically, even though they’ve already awarded them to us, I have to do an application after the fact, so I’m working on trying to figure out what exactly they need for me in order to actually collect on that money.”
“The earliest we would be looking at for like breaking ground or doing any sort of construction or whatever, would be sometime next year. The funding for that is biennial, so it’d be every other year and we would have through next year to get it figured out.”
Project costs are something else still up in the air. “I can tell you that when I first got an estimate,” Biddix said, “…I had like zero time to get it done. I called one contractor who gave me one bid, which was like half a bid for like the actual fixtures and things like that. It didn’t include any sort of construction or installation costs; I had to estimate that.”
“So when I first gave them the information on what I was proposing to them, the project was going to run around $85,000. But this year, we put we put in our budget $50,000 from the Capital Bill and $50,000 from a combination of the general fund and the park fund, so we actually have $100,000 budgeted for that project.”
When the idea of a splash pad materialized, Biddix was immediately thrown into a position where she was up against an unforgiving deadline. “We were solicited by Representative Derek Merrin (Ohio District 47) to put in an application for funding,” she said.
“He called me one day, and he’s like, ‘I want you to apply for something in the Capital Bill. The only catch is, you’ve got two days to get an application in.’ So I literally threw this together in two days.”
“We asked for $70,000; they gave us $50,000. So $50,000 of it is being funded by the State Capitol Bill, and the other $50,000 that we have in the budget is a combination between the general fund and the park fund.”
“What I’ve told Council is I’m searching for other grant sources to supplement this. One that I’m going to look into in addition to the Capitol Bill is Nature Works, because even though the Capitol Bill is state money, Nature Works can also piggyback off of that, and I think it will max fund like 80% of the project.”
“So I’d be able to get maybe $30,000 from Nature Works max, if it does cost us $100,000 to do this project. So the best case scenario for us, we’ll have $20,000 out of pocket is what I’m looking at.”
The final aspect is equally important…the design of the splash pad itself. That too is still up in the air. “I didn’t like either one of the options that they sent me from the one contractor that gave me a bid,” said Biddix. “They’re ugly, and they’re not what we would actually put in.”
The Fayette splash pad isn’t on the fast track to completion, but the train is definitely on the rails. Ms. Biddix has had to clear some big hurdles right out of the gate, but once the insanity levels drop, look for the Village of Fayette to take assertive steps toward the future installation of these family friendly fixtures.
Tim can be reached at tim@thevillagereporter.com