FAIRMONT– Moving forward with plans to upgrade Gomsrud Park was up for consideration Monday evening during the Fairmont City Council meeting. The city has been working on several concept plans for the park over the past few months.

Before the agenda was approved, Council Member Britney Kawecki made a motion to remove the topic from the agenda. Kawecki said she felt it should be removed due to lack of community support and because she said more information was needed before a decision could be made. The motion died due to lack of a second.

When the topic of Gomsrud Park came up, Mayor Lee Baarts also asked whether they should table the topic. Council Members Deb Foster and Michele Miller noted that the conversation has been taking place for months and voiced desire to make a decision.

The motion to table the topic failed 4-1 with Kawecki the sole councilor in favor.

On Monday, City Administrator Cathy Reynolds recapped that the city has contracted with SGA Group, a landscape architecture firm based out of Buffalo, to develop several different concepts for the park.

“Everybody acknowledges that the boat ramps need work, the parking lots needs work,” Reynolds said.

Rather than digging up ground to make the improvements and putting everything back where it was, Reynolds said in coming up with different concept designs they’ve been considering how to make the park safer and more functional.

Originally four different concept designs were provided. The Park Board has played a role in making recommendations about the various concepts and layout of the park and a survey was also put out to get the community’s feedback about what it would like to see in the park.

With the feedback provided, the four concepts were narrowed down to two, and then one, which was shown to the city council on Monday. Reynolds clarified at this time it’s just a schematic design.

“We have $2.25 million in the budget for 2023 to start working on this park. The current estimate that SGA has put together on the conceptual design is coming in at $2.8 million,” Reynolds said.

Parks and Streets Superintendent, Nick Lardy, also spoke during Monday’s meeting. He agreed that the design is just a general well thought-out schematic design and has not gone through the engineering design phase yet.

“After seeing Gomsrud Park the last two weekends, we are going to need some more parking space,” Lardy said.

He added that in the 22 years he’s lived on the lake, he’s never seen so many ice houses on the lakes. He noted that a lot of people come to Fairmont to take advantage of the five frozen lakes in the winter to fish on.

The updates to the park won’t just be aesthetic, as stormwater runoff issues will also be addressed.

Foster suggested if people have a concern with what’s going on at the park, they should speak up. Like Reynolds and Lardy, she noted that the public has been given the opportunity to provide thoughts and feedback regarding the project several times.

“No matter how long we prolong it, we’re still going to have people saying it was the wrong thing to do,” Foster said.

Reynolds said that the project will be done in phases and that phase one includes work to the boat ramps. She said that they’re eyeing several grants to help pay for the project but that they need to continue working on it. She asked for council’s authorization to have city staff continue to move forward with the project.

The motion passed 4-1 with Kawecki against it.