Neighbors to Vote on Park Restoration Funding

More than 500 homeowners in Elk Grove’s Hampton Village neighborhood will get a second opportunity to vote on whether they want to pay higher fees for the maintenance and restoration of their local park and street corridors.

Citizen file photo – McConnell Park’s blighted softball field.

The Cosumnes Community Services District (CSD) board on Nov. 18 approved $21,000 in funding for a ballot measure that may mailed out to residents as early as February. Voters would then have 45 days to submit their decisions to the district by April.

If the new fee is approved, McConnell Park’s restoration may be completed by the summer of 2017.

“This effort has a recognized need,” CSD Board President Gil Albiani said. “If you go past the park, I think everyone sees that.”

The maintenance for the CSD’s parks are funded via Landscape and Lighting assessment fees paid by the parks’ neighbors. Hampton Village residents now pay an annual $150 fee, which is deemed insufficient by the CSD staff for watering and landscaping.

Six years ago, the majority of Hampton Village residents rejected a ballot measure that would have increased their fee in order to adequately cover the rising landscaping costs of keeping McConnell Park green.

The CSD staff then reduced the park’s upkeep by not watering a 1.4-acre section of the park and letting its grass die. Its softball field is now an eyesore of dead grass and weeds.

A similar ballot measure was also rejected by residents in the Fallbrook neighborhood in 2009. They soon saw the effects such as closed restrooms at Hill Park and the unfinished completion of Van Doren Park, all due to a lack of adequate funding.

Several Fallbrook residents then successfully convinced the CSD board to call for a second vote and they persuaded more neighbors to approve the increased fees to restore their parks.

This year, a group of Hampton Village residents aimed to repeat that success by going door-to-door in their neighborhood and informing homeowners about a possible second vote to restore and enhance McConnell Park.

Jack Williams, a Hampton Village resident of 20 years, led the effort to get his neighbors to give feedback to the CSD staff on the park and to get them interested in a new vote.

“It brought us closer together as a community,” he told the CSD board on Nov. 18.

Williams previously led cleanup efforts in local parks through the Mormon Helping Hands project.

The CSD staff held a few neighborhood meetings where most attendees desired new features such as new playground equipment and the replacement of the softball field with a basketball court, a walking trail and a nature garden.

“We lived with this problem long enough,” Williams said about the current park’s landscaping.

The CSD staff estimated that homeowners would have to pay $133 in addition to their current $150 assessment in order to cover the expenses, according to a staff report.

Once more than 50 percent of homeowners approve the new fee, designs for the new park will be presented to the CSD board in the winter of 2017, the district’s chief of planning, Paul Mewton said.