Cortland Standard .net

By SARAH VABER
Staff Reporter
svaber@cortlandstandard.net
DRYDEN — A village committee tasked with planning improvements to Montgomery Park — such as a new playground and an added entrance — is set to solicit community input Saturday at a meeting at the park.
The committee suggests the village revitalize the aging park by adding an entrance from Main Street, moving the current pavilion closer to the parking lot or rebuilding it on a spot near the lot and creating a playground for young children, said Kevin Laubacker, the chairman of the committee.
The changes would also make the park more open to public view, reducing crime in the area, according to village police.
The committee is still considering ideas and wants to hear from residents about what they would like to see at the park, Laubacker said.
“It’s not just us forcing ideas on the community, we want their feedback,” he said.
The village hired Rick Manning, who owns an Ithaca-based landscape architecture company, to help the committee come up with a design plan for the park, Laubacker said.
The service cost $4,910, but the village will use $3,000 it secured from Tompkins County’s Creating Healthy Places to Live, Work and Play program to help off set the expense, said Debra Marrotte, the village clerk and treasurer.
One of the proposed changes would be to move the park’s pavilion closer to the parking lot so that picnickers do not have to walk across the park to an area where their vehicles are hidden from view, Laubacker said. The committee is also suggesting a playground for children ages 1 to 5 be built, he said.
A previous wooden playground was taken down after it became unsafe for children to play in, Laubacker said. That playground was removed about three or four years ago, said Ron Moore, village superintendent of public works.
The wooden playground was rotting out, but people had also started sleeping out in the set at night and drug activity was occurring around the playground, Laubacker said.
Drug activity in the park decreased after the old playground was removed, said Acting Police Chief Mike Watkins.
“It’s not as prevalent as it was,” Watkins said.
But in 2014 there were still about a dozen police calls to the park for criminal mischief, suspicious people in the park and suspected drug activity, he said.
Montgomery Park is secluded and, like any area that offers a shelter and screening from public view, “nefarious activities” tend to occur there, Watkins said.
The committee’s efforts to make the park more open, better lighted and more family friendly should help reduce the unwanted behavior, he said.
Marrotte could not say how much the village has available to renovate the park as there is no specific budget line for the park. The village board could decide to use money from a couple of different sections of the budget, or use money left over at the end of the fiscal year, to help fund the project, she said.
Board member and committee member Michael Hattery could not be reached for furtherinformation.
Grants and other forms of community support will likely be needed to fund renovations at the park, Laubacker said.
A final architectural landscape drawing is expected in October and afterward the committee will submit a finalized plan to the village board for its review and approval, he said.
“We’ll do the ideas that are approved in stages,” Laubacker said.
It has not yet been determined when work will begin. That will depend on what funding is secured, he said.
If residents are not able to make it to the meeting scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday at the park, they can email mpcpc@googlegroups.com, take a survey at www.surveymonkey.com/s/MontgomeryPk or talk to committee members on June 13 at their Dairy Day table in the park.