By Alice Waugh
Strat’s Place, the playground that has been closed since early May for safety reasons, will be pulled down over the summer and left as an open space for a while as town officials and residents figure out what to put in its place.
Since the playground was built in 1989, safety codes and materials have changed significantly. The closure came after an aborted inspection that revealed so many problems that the inspection was halted. “After a brief 1.5-hour review of the playground, it is my professional opinion that you should remove the entire structure,” inspector Nancy White wrote in her report (see the Lincoln Squirrel, May 8, 2014).
Recreation Department Director Dan Pereira outlined the situation at recent meetings of the Parks and Recreation Committee and the School Committee, “and everyone seems to recognize that [the playground] has reached the end of its useful life,” he said on Wednesday.
Park and Rec has indicated in the past to town budget officials that it would be seeking about $150,000 for a new playground at some point, most likely from the Community Preservation Committee (CPC). At Town Meeting in 2014, residents approved spending a total of $826,000 on 12 CPC projects.
However, there will be no funding request at Town Meeting in spring 2015, Pereira said.
“We’re not going to rush to have something ready for this fall,” when board and commissions begin submitting budget requests for the next fiscal year, he said. Instead, a group of people will be formed to “envision what the future of that space will be… We want to find out what are the community’s needs and do a ground-up assessment of what’s the best use” for the space.
Park and Rec “is particularly interested in keeping options as wide open as possible,” so the space may even turn into something other than a playground, Pereira said.
The playground will be pulled down sometime in July or August at a cost of $8,000 to $10,000, which will come out of the Recreation Department’s operating budget, Pereira said. “We want to avoid it becoming an attractive nuisance or even a hazard,” he said. The fencing, partial blacktop and soft surface will remain so preschoolers can still use the empty space with supervision, he added.
Strat’s was used mostly on weekends by older children, “and that will be the biggest loss for folks,” School Superintendent Becky McFall noted at the May 22 School Committee meeting.
McFall suggested placing large colorful signs around the perimeter to warn children not to climb the fence and use the playground, noting that she sometimes seen children doing this from her office overlooking Strat’s.
The playground was named for Mike Stratton, a former teacher at the Carroll School who ran its Bounders program of outdoor adventures based on the Maine Outward Bound program, according to Peter von Mertens, a resident who was involved in planning and building Strat’s. Stratton died of brain cancer and his widow asked that in lieu of flowers, people could make a contribution to a new active adventure playground. Those gifts provided the seed money needed to hire Leathers and Associates to design the playground, he said.
“That financial impetus and Mike’s love of the outdoors and of involving young people in challenging activities made it very appropriate for us to call the playground Strat’s Place,” von Mertens said.