Town officials say they’re planning to start installing new playground equipment at Waveny at the end of this month, though the widely anticipated facility won’t be ready for public use until the spring.
That’s because the Poured-In-Place rubber surface that will anchor the children’s playground “has to go in during certain temperatures,” according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann.
“What we don’t want to do is put the [playground] units out there and then people are going to want to go use them, so it’s an attractive nuisance where we’re stuck,” Mann said during a Town Council and Board of Finance Infrastructure & Utilities Subcommittee meeting, held Monday at Town Hall and via videoconference.
He continued: “We’re balancing a point of when to put them [the play structures] in the ground and then come back with the Poured-In-Place surface. And our thought is at the end of February it’s going to take us two or three weeks to put it all in the ground and then by mid-March we should have favorable temperatures to then put the Poured-In-Place surface in. Everything is here, ready to go. We’re just waiting for favorable weather to finish that project and that should be done some time around May 1, April 15, depending on when that Poured-In-Place surface can go in.”
A public-private partnership, the new playground will be located on the island of land that runs alongside the seasonal ice skating rink at Waveny, near the Orchard Field. A new fitness area is already in place there.
Mann’s comments came during a general update on capital projects.
Subcommittee member Cristina A. Ross, a Town Council representative, asked whether the project is on budget. Mann responded: “Under [budget], actually.”
Town officials last month approved about $33,000 in contracts to install new fencing around the Waveny Park Playground and otherwise prepare the site.
Public discussions around putting in a playground at Waveny—which didn’t have a playground, but an all-abilities exercise equipment area that many kids mistook for one—first emerged about five years ago. In 2023, a committee that would become the Friends of Waveny Park Playground group formed in order to fundraise and advise on equipment. The total project cost has been pegged at about $775,000, a total reached with town funds, a large state grant and privately raised dollars.
Mann noted during this week’s meeting that the new playground area has been graded.
“And it has granite curb all the way around it,” he said. “The grading on the outside is done. The equipment has been delivered and it’s in storage, at present.”