Fort Smith Parks boss provides more detail on $35 million Riverfront Park plan

Fort Smith Parks and Recreation Department Head Doug Reinert acknowledged that the Riverfront Park could be a 15-year-or-more project and further explained the financials for the estimated $35 million plan in an interview with Talk Business & Politics on Wednesday (March 9).

The park, planned for a 51-acre plot of land along Riverfront Drive, is set to be funded through the city’s 1/8-cent sales tax for the department as well as a variety of additional mechanisms and fundraising efforts with $1.5 million per year committed to its development through 2020.

“Basically we’re going to do a small portion of it, then hopefully apply for grant opportunities and add things as we go,” Reinert explained. “We’ll also see if we can develop partnerships with hospitals and schools, UAFS, and see if we can get some people together.”

What the Riverfront Park ultimately turns out to be will be dictated by “what other people want, how we can get there, what we can do, and what resources are available,” he added, pointing out that it comes down to money.

Dave Roberts of Crafton Tull & Associates presented the Fort Smith Board of Directors with an estimated $35 million park master plan at Tuesday’s (March 8) study session. A major part of that plan was a $26 million indoor recreation center on a 10-acre portion of land within the greater 51 acres. The master plan also included multiple soccer fields, a playground, a rubber-surfaced “Miracle League Field” for special needs children, and a multi-use trail, among other amenities.

Reinert said the recreation center would be something the Parks and Recreation Department would have to work toward and the annual $1.5 million allocation from the 1/8-cent sales tax would be focused on the park’s remaining 41 acres.

“What we are setting aside will essentially do only a fifth of everything in the plan,” Reinert said. “The rec center will have to be pushed off way into the future unless we can attract some big sponsorships and there are enough people calling for it, or we can sell bonds, or whatever that mechanism may be. The park will be build-as-we-go.”

Reinert said there was an additional $2 million committed toward other parks projects through 2020, such as trail systems, splash parks, tennis courts, and improvements to Martin Luther King, Jr., Park. Once those projects are adequately funded, the Board could elect to devote more funding to Riverfront Park.

“We’ll really have to go from there (on the rec center),” Reinert added. “I would hope that maybe it could happen sometime in the next 15 years.”

Features and amenities for the indoor recreation center as proposed by Crafton Tull would be flexible depending on what the city and other partners wanted. As an example, Reinert said the center could include weight rooms, a restaurant, community rooms, volleyball courts, basketball goals, indoor soccer fields, a gymnastics room, walking track, restrooms, or swimming pool, to name a few, though he warned that items like an indoor pool would be significantly more expensive to maintain than a volleyball court.

“These facilities do have some maintenance costs and overhead attached no matter what, but many generate revenues through concessions, tournament fees, and whatever they can have subsidized through a university, the city, private groups, and the county,” Reinert said. “It would be another joint venture (like Parrot Island Theme Park). These goals can be unachievable by themselves. It’s always nice to dream big, but if we have to scale it back, we can.”

Reinert said Fort Smith is “the first city I’ve seen that is this large that doesn’t have some sort of a rec center. … We have indoor gyms and those sorts of things, but it would be nice to have a place for all of these things. You could do monthly memberships, family passes, day passes and yearly passes to offset some of the utility costs and overhead. What we don’t want is for that 10 acres to go idle.”

One option the Board could choose in lieu of a recreation center would be to install additional soccer fields, which would address one concern Mayor Sandy Sanders had at Tuesday’s study session – that Fort Smith’s growing demand for additional soccer fields might not be met by the master plan as presented.

But if the Board did end up going with a recreation center, Reinert said he would begin looking more closely at things like square footage, design, and specific costs of individual features and amenities.