Council Members Ron Anders, Lynda Tremaine, Beth Witten, Mayor Bill Ham, and other members of the city staff packed into pickup trucks Tuesday morning to tour the $4 million plot of land the Council is considering purchasing.
At their meeting last week, an agreement to purchase 160 acres of land off of Richland Road from the Auburn City Board of Education came before the City Council.
The land is part of a larger 272-acre plot purchased by the school board in July 2016. After the school board put together a master plan for it, they determined they would need only a fraction of the original purchase. The city had been eyeing the land even before the school board bought it last summer.
The primary use of the land if purchased, City Manager Charlie Duggan said last week, would be as part of the Parks and Recreation Master Plan being developed by the city.
During
"The school board closed on this property in July," Witten said at the City Council meeting last week. "And this is the first time this body, collectively, has discussed this, and that's really where my concern lies."
After further discussion, the Council voted to table the agreement until they could schedule a tour and review possible plans.
While they restated they were never opposed to the idea of buying the land, both Tremaine and Witten said they were glad they took the mayor’s suggestion to put their hiking boots on and see the land for themselves before voting on the purchase.
“This was what we wanted to see,” Tremaine said. “Once you see where they can put their ballfields and things like that, you say ‘Oh that really does fit well.'”
Witten agreed, saying it was good to “lay eyes" on the land.
“It was good to see the vision and the
The mock-up, which is a preliminary draft meant to showcase possible land uses, includes baseball fields, basketball courts and multipurpose fields.
An important feature noted in the pitch for the land is the almost
“The things that were starting to come out of the comments from the master plan meetings were more passive parks, more trails, more need for athletic facilities,” Richardson said. ”There’s space out here to do all of those if we needed to.”
Richardson also said many residents had requested an area open to the public for fishing, which the lake could provide.
The land, which is tucked away between Richland Road and Martin Luther King Drive, could be connected to the surrounding neighborhoods Lundy Chase and Willow Creek, Richardson said.
Anders, who described the purchase at the meeting last week as an opportunity to build a park for generations to come, today said it was rare to get such a “blank slate” of land available within city limits.
The Council will address the proposal and vote on the purchase agreement at their next meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 21.
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