The City of Houston’s newest park project will soon move from the drawing board to the construction stage.
At its meeting last Monday, the city council unanimously approved the park board’s recommended design for Rutherford Park, selected from among five submitted by an engineering firm. The chosen layout for the park – which will occupy a seven-acre tract of land on Westwood Drive, west of the Houston Municipal Airport – will include two regulation-size soccer fields for kids under-8 competition, along with picnic tables, a large grassy open area, and two sizable gravel parking lots.
City of Houston Director of Development Elaine Campbell said one of the factors that led to the design being chosen is that construction will not require removing any of the site’s numerous mature trees.
“It’s a beautiful spot,” Campbell said. “We knew going in we might have to remove a few trees, but with this design not many will be taken out.”
The triangular-shaped park will be built on land that was formerly part of golf course property that was purchased for construction of the airport, and is being used to store fill dirt. Development of the park – which will feature a handicapped-accessible picnic table, and an area for handicapped parking – will include removal of some small trees, earthwork to level soccer fields, seeding and mulch for fields and picnic areas, fencing around soccer fields, and installation of signage.
Campbell said one of the other designs that caught the eye of park board members was ultimately sidelined because soccer fields would have been built atop a spot where a golf course pond once existed.
“It’s very, very soft, and would have required a lot of dirt work,” she said.
The $105,000 Rutherford Park project was made possible by a $47,250 grant from the Department of Natural Resources Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), a federally funded program administered by the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service. The grant is the latest in a series of LWCF grants that Houston has received beginning in 1973, most of which went toward development and improvements at West Side Park (including the addition of the park’s swimming pool).
At the outset, the new park’s bathroom options will be limited to porta-potties, but Campbell said the council has already begun discussing adding permanent facilities.
“They’ve said they need to look at budgeting for it,” she said. “So they’re thinking about it, and it will come, but it’s one step at a time.”
The city hopes to have Rutherford Park ready for spring soccer in 2014.
“We’re hopeful,” Campbell said. “Everything has been sort of tracking along.”