The city’s seven regional parks are intended to be community hubs of activity with varied offerings for families and children.
Baseball fields, soccer fields, walking trails, tennis courts, playground equipment and people — the components that make a park a park.
Ed Austin Regional Park in East Arlington has many of those, plus a skate facility that’s often packed.
The 140-acre respite at McCormick and Monument roads is really the standard bearer for what Jacksonville wants to do with its regional facilities.
Lonnie C. Miller Sr. Regional Park in Northwest Jacksonville is on the other end of the spectrum.
From the park, people can hear the hum of cars speeding down Moncrief Road and Soutel Drive.
They can see a series of covered pavilions with grills. A cluster of sun-bleached playground equipment. And a chain-link fence that isolates part of the park because of environmental concerns.
They won’t see those amenities that make parks like Ed Austin attractive. And they often won’t see the masses of families and children the parks are intended to serve.
“Ed Austin (park) is our goal,” Daryl Joseph, city Parks, Recreation and Community Services director, recently told council members.
The closest park of comparable size to serve Northwest Jacksonville is William Sheffield Regional Park — 17 miles away off New Berlin Road.
Joseph went on to say Lonnie Miller Park is probably the least developed regional park in the system.
That could start to change in the next year, though.
City Council on Tuesday approved two bills to appropriate $3.1 million to overhaul the Northwest Jacksonville park.
Plans call for an outdoor amphitheater stage, eight basketball courts, seven tennis courts, a multiuse field and more picnic pavilions and parking lots. There’s also a design for a baseball complex.
Council member Reggie Brown, who represents the district, has been a strong proponent of improving the facility, calling it his goal to make a “one-stop shop” for park goers.
Others on council see the need for the area, too.
Council member Bill Gulliford recently called the project “critically important” for children in the neighborhood.
“I don’t think we can do that fast enough,” he recently said of improving the park.
One idea in recent years was to add a water park to the facility, but the more than $2 million cost and use drew some opposition and it ultimately went nowhere.
This version of improvements, though, had support as council unanimously supported the ideas.
Funding comes from account balances in the Soutel/Moncrief Community Redevelopment Area and leftover funding from another Northwest Jacksonville project.
As for the environmental issues on the site, a separate bill will soon be introduced to fund the cleanup, once it’s determined what is needed.
Hardscaped aspects of the park like basketball and tennis courts along with the parking lots would mean those are will not need to be remediated.
The improvements will make it a more-suitable gathering place for the public space named after Miller, a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office detective who was killed in 1995 while responding to a burglary call. That case remains unsolved.
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