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Due to wear and tear and new guidelines for park safety, Augusta will soon remove the equipment from three of its parks.
The biggest loss will be at Garvin Park where all of the equipment that has been in place for decades will be removed. The consensus on the city council at Monday night’s work session was that something would replace the equipment but a design and timeline for that replacement will have to be determined by the Parks Board and the Council.
The playground equipment near the public pool and at Shryock Park, inside the fenced in enclosure near the shelter on the east side of the Augusta City Lake will also be removed.
Mayor Kristey Williams remembered playing on the spiral “tornado” slide in Garvin Park when she was in grade school in Augusta. Councilor Sue Jones mentioned she was older than Williams and remembered playing on much of the equipment that is still in Garvin Park.
But times have changed and litigation has led to new regulations.
Rose Hill City Inspector Randy Hladik is a Certified Playground Safety Inspector and he was invited to Augusta by Public Works Director Cy Ricker and Parks Foreman Brian Alfaro to check out Augusta’s park equipment.
The equipment is checked and items needing improvement are ranked on a priority scale from 1 (should be corrected immediately) to 5 (maintenance recommended).
The equipment in Garvin Park was found to have 11 Priority 1 issues. There were six more Priority 2 issues. All of these were on top of the basic condition of having no fall protection material – the equipment is set into the ground with no mulch or other material to break falls.
Alfaro told the half of the council who attended the work session that there were no cheap or easy repairs for some of the equipment in the older parks.
Mayor Williams, Jones, Matt Malone and Ron Reavis attended the work session and Matt Childers was present but missed part of the meeting due to attending a function for one of his children that he said had been planned for months before the work session was scheduled. Holly Harper, Mike Huddleston, Mike Rawlings and Mike Wallace were not able to attend Monday’s meeting.
“Almost everything in Garvin Park is priority one or two,” Alfaro said. “Fixing the problems probably means ripping it all out of the ground.”
Some of the problems at Garvin park include head entrapment potential on the slide, slide steps and slide rails; crush points on the teeter-totter fulcrum; entanglement issues with gaps on the spiral slide and various problems with the condition and placement of swings.
Due to wear and tear and new guidelines for park safety, Augusta will soon remove the equipment from three of its parks.
The biggest loss will be at Garvin Park where all of the equipment that has been in place for decades will be removed. The consensus on the city council at Monday night’s work session was that something would replace the equipment but a design and timeline for that replacement will have to be determined by the Parks Board and the Council.
The playground equipment near the public pool and at Shryock Park, inside the fenced in enclosure near the shelter on the east side of the Augusta City Lake will also be removed.
Mayor Kristey Williams remembered playing on the spiral “tornado” slide in Garvin Park when she was in grade school in Augusta. Councilor Sue Jones mentioned she was older than Williams and remembered playing on much of the equipment that is still in Garvin Park.
But times have changed and litigation has led to new regulations.
Rose Hill City Inspector Randy Hladik is a Certified Playground Safety Inspector and he was invited to Augusta by Public Works Director Cy Ricker and Parks Foreman Brian Alfaro to check out Augusta’s park equipment.
The equipment is checked and items needing improvement are ranked on a priority scale from 1 (should be corrected immediately) to 5 (maintenance recommended).
The equipment in Garvin Park was found to have 11 Priority 1 issues. There were six more Priority 2 issues. All of these were on top of the basic condition of having no fall protection material – the equipment is set into the ground with no mulch or other material to break falls.
Alfaro told the half of the council who attended the work session that there were no cheap or easy repairs for some of the equipment in the older parks.
Mayor Williams, Jones, Matt Malone and Ron Reavis attended the work session and Matt Childers was present but missed part of the meeting due to attending a function for one of his children that he said had been planned for months before the work session was scheduled. Holly Harper, Mike Huddleston, Mike Rawlings and Mike Wallace were not able to attend Monday’s meeting.
“Almost everything in Garvin Park is priority one or two,” Alfaro said. “Fixing the problems probably means ripping it all out of the ground.”
Some of the problems at Garvin park include head entrapment potential on the slide, slide steps and slide rails; crush points on the teeter-totter fulcrum; entanglement issues with gaps on the spiral slide and various problems with the condition and placement of swings.
The equipment inside the fence at Shryock Park had similar issues. No fall protection material is present. There was a broken swing seat and the handles on the teeter-totter were not looped.
At the pool, the slide had major issues, there were several head entrapment concerns and problems with the design of the structure.
Some of the issues at the older and newer parks are obvious. Exposed nails and worn or missing bolts don’t require an inspector to notice. However, the CPSI guidelines changed in 2004, after Play Park Pointe was built. The new guidelines call for six feet of clearance between structures in the park. The old guidelines didn’t require as much.
“It was designed to be handicap accessible when it was built about 10 years ago,” Williams said.
Many of the issues in Play Park Pointe are easier to repair. The newer parks at Bill Reed Park and Jim Brown Park had few or no problems.
The council and parks board discussed how big of a priority parks are for the citizens of Augusta.
The consensus of the council was to request the Parks Board to develop a short term and long-term plan on how they think the council should proceed with equipment installation at the city’s parks.
It will be up to the council to determine which of those plans to complete and how to fund them. City Manager Bill Keefer told those in attendance that there was some money available for projects this year but coming up with $100,000-$200,000 from this year’s budget would be difficult – especially with the large sewer drain pipe project the city is having to complete near the railroad in southeast Augusta.
The park equipment will be removed soon and the Parks Board will report back to the council with a plan for replacing some of it at a meeting in the near future.
