Carl Junction leaders look at improvements in utilities, parks

CARL JUNCTION, Mo. - Carl Junction residents will see improvements in water and natural gas service in the near future and upgrades to the parks throughout the city.

Carl Junction City Administrator Steve Lawver said residents are seeing road construction because of a $2.3 million city project to improve water lines and a large project by Spire to replace old natural gas lines.

"We're replacing some smaller like four-inch water mains and going to eight-inch mains," Lawver said. "That's going on over in Oscie Ora Acres and then over here in the downtown part of town also. And then Spire is in town doing a really large gas line improvement program. They've got contractors in town doing the same thing. There are some smaller lines that they're replacing and so homes will have better water and gas capacity available to them. Right now they're kind of competing on who can tear up the roads the most."

Spire's is a private project with no input by the city, but the water project is part of a series of improvements the Carl Junction Council is working on.

Another part of the city improvements plans will be a strategic plan commissioned by Carl Junction leaders from SAP Design Architects from Springfield and Kansas City and Joplin-based Allgeier Martin and Associates.

"It will basically cover all aspects of town and we expect that report back probably the end of April or first part of May," Lawver said. "They've been working on it for about a year. We had a few projects in mind at first but we wanted to get citizen input on it, so this has been a citizen-driven process. We've had a couple of meetings where citizens could come and we had a storyboard for each park. We had some ideas that we put on there but then we asked what do they envision? What do they want to see for the parks, and they were able to give the input in that way. We will incorporate what the citizens were wanting."

Lawver said the city doesn't have a budget yet on the improvements that will come from the report.

"That would be the next process after we get this strategic plan in place," he said. "We can go through and start picking the priorities and then we can develop a budget for them."

Lawver said the city pool in Center Creek Park will remain closed this summer but the new splash pad the city built in Memorial Park will be open.

"The pool and splash pad are part of the strategic plan for the parks, what we want to do with them," Lawver said. "There was talk of turning the pool into a very large pavilion and remodeling the bathrooms and making them ADA accessible and make the concession stand available, things like that. There are quite a few people who don't want the pool reopened and would like an expansion of the splash pad into some kind of aquatics park and moving all that into Memorial Park."

Lawver said the city is also looking at getting the baseball and softball fields out of Frank Dean Park, which is vulnerable to flooding when Center Creek gets out of its banks, and moving them somewhere else away from the water.

Lawver said the city is also preparing for year two of a farmers' market in the Briarbrook area and is making plans to market about 37 acres of land on Highway 171 near Gum Road for business development.

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