By Jason Stone
Twitter: @thestonecave

Proponents of more city park space in Surprise are certainly getting good news this holiday season.

Thanks to more money than expected in the city’s budget, a new eight-acre park with enough space for seven soccer fields near the City Center is on its way.

“Our city manager [Mike Frazier] gets to play a little Santa and give our residents some Christmas bonuses, and those are coming in the form of new projects’ funding,” Assistant Budget Director Holly Osborn revealed to the Surprise City Council Dec. 15.

In addition to the new park, the city plans to fund the completion of the Gaines Baseball Park in the Original Town Site, make other park enhancements across the city and fund two other one-time projects — a well relocation and future land purchases.

The council also voted to create a reserve of $13 million for pensions.

Between higher-than-expected revenues and a series of cost-saving measures, the city has about $31.5 million that can be spent on needed projects  put on hold when COVID first struck.

The city wants to spend $25.7 millon on all of them, including the pensions money. The park projects alone would cost $8.3 million.

“This is fantastic news,” Vice Mayor Chris Judd said. “I can’t tell you how many complaints we’ve had about that little field over there by Countryside.”

The new 8-acre park would use 10 acres of existing city land at Greenway and Parkview, next to Countryside Elementary and across from Valley Vista High School.

“We looked at what could give us the biggest bang for our buck,” Ms. Osborn said.

The park could include seven recreation size soccer fields, restrooms and 330 parking spaces.

Estimates show the one-time cost would be around $4.7 million with annual operating costs hovering around $480,000.

Those costs would be between programming and maintenance. With additional fields, the city would be able to add a new spring season for recreation soccer and flag football. 

Officials estimate they would recover 45% of costs from new program revenue.

The city also estimates it would have to hire staff to maintain the park and also pay for utilities, maintenance and field prep.

For the Gaines Park project, it still needed $571,000 of additional funding to complete. The budget already had $1.4 million set aside to construct the new park across the street from where it used to be at Nash and Rimrock streets.

The additional money will help finish the parking lot and install lights around the field.

“This will allow it to be completely funded this fiscal year,” Ms. Osborn said. 

For other park enhancements, potential improvements include parking lot pavings, restrooms, dog park drainage and lighting.

The city is setting aside $3 million to complete some of those and plans on $100,000 a year in operational costs. However, Ms. Osborn said $3 million likely won’t be enough to complete all the plans.

While the council seemed receptive to the addition of more park space, not everyone was sold on piecing together parks as money became available.

District 4 Councilman Ken Remley said the city is falling further behind its 2015 Parks and Recreation Master Plan.

“I would really like to see us go forward with a plan ... so we have some ability to actually plan our disbursements rather than just saying, ‘Oh, we got $10 million this year and we’ll do this,’” Mr. Remley said.

Two other one-time funding projects — a well relocation at 175th Avenue and Waddell Road and future land purchases — are also coming.

The well needs to be removed to allow 175th Avenue to align across Waddell. The relocation cost is expected to be $2.4 million, but that does not include the road construction costs.

“You couldn’t even talk about doing that road with that well there,” District 3 City Councilman Patrick Duffy said. “Starting with this well is a huge achievement for that area over there. Three years now that well has driven me nuts.”

Ms. Osborn quipped, “It was not well-placed.”

For  land purchases, the city has established a $2 million fund to acquire area for future city amenities and services.

The city also is increasing the budget for the new Public Safety and Readiness Facility by $1.6 million. This will allow the facility to have five vehicle bays and three police inspection bays.

For pensions, the state is requiring all cities to be fully funded by June 2036. As of  June 30, Surprise had an unfunded liability of $41 million.

The city has created a pension reserve system with one-time funding of $13 million.

All of these projects were made possible because a better-than-expected budget year. City officials deliberately created a conservative budget that prepared for the worst but allowed for this kind of flexibility in case things weren’t as bad as thought.

For fiscal year 2020, the city collected $2.9 million more in sales tax than it expected. There was also $5.8 million more collected for charges for services than was budgeted.

The city also factored in $9 million of the more than $16 million in received in state CARES funding earlier this year. The rest of that money is in the fiscal year 2021 budget.

As for savings in fiscal year 2020, the city trimmed off about $12.6 million from what was budgeted originally. Most of that ($5.2 million) was in personnel because of a hiring freeze and furloughs instituted in March. The city also saved $4.5 million for services and $2.7 million for contingency.

For fiscal year 2021, the city has so far collected about $14.4 million more than was budgeted so far, including the remaining $7 million from the CARES funding. The expeneses, so far, have been $2 million under budget.

Jason Stone can be reached at jstone@newszap.com.

Jason Stone
News Editor | Surprise
@thestonecave

jstone@iniusa.com

Former NAU Lumberjack who loves going to concerts (or I did), watching sports (or I did) and hanging out with friends (oh, never mind). I also enjoy backgammon, surfing and men who are not afraid to cry.