Stoney Creek Park Alliance will wait to apply for grant
By Anessa Myers
Published in News on October 19, 2007 1:46 PM
The Stoney Creek Park Alliance won't receive the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund grant this year to help with the park project.
They will not even apply.
The alliance decided Thursday that they want to hold off on the application process to make sure that park plans are exactly what they need to be, in great part to a recommendation made by N.C. State University Recreation Resources Services consultant Stephen Moler.
"This project needs to be well-planned (for the grant to be approved)," Moler said. "You may want to pull back on it, and submit all the guns next year."
The alliance submitted an application for the grant last year, but the grant was denied for a few reasons including an insufficient comprehensive park plan and no public survey.
And Moler wants to make sure that this time, the alliance has the best chance of having its request approved.
Grant approval is based on the number of points that are awarded to the comprehensive park plan, application and public survey, he said. The more points, the better the chance the request will be approved.
The park plan should represent what the people of Goldsboro want, he added, and to do that, the alliance should wait for survey results.
Goldsboro Parks and Recreation director Sonya Shaw agreed.
"I think it's good to wait," she said.
Once all of the results come in, then Moler said the alliance should work on the plan from there.
"Say if most people want walking trails, well then you put a walking trail on the plan. And in your application, you say that you put a trail in because that is what the people wanted, according to the survey," he said. "You see, there is a certain logic to how these things should be laid out. It is a sort of cause and effect."
The survey results might change the current plan completely, but he said planners have to put in what people want to see, even if it throws the timeline off.
And, of course, if the alliance focuses on putting requested items in the plan, its grant request will be awarded more points.
Moler said the alliance has done well so far with getting the plan together and the surveys out, but he wants volunteers to step off the gas a bit.
"Slow down, and let's do it right," he said. "Stoney Creek Park has so much potential."