Upgrades to Arnold’s Roosevelt Park may have to wait after estimates for work there came in significantly higher than expected.
City officials planned to use Community Development Block Grant money to pay for upgrades, but the costs are far exceeding the money available. The city will have to redo its CDBG application to account for the scrapping of the park plans, at least for now.
The estimate to make Roosevelt Park’s restrooms handicapped accessible came in at $20,000, twice the allocation in the city’s CDGB application for the year. The estimate to convert the park’s T-ball field into a playground was a whopping $800,000, 16 times higher than the $50,000 earmarked for it, according to Rick Rayburg, who retired as the community development director last year, but was hired on a temporary basis to shepherd the CDBG application through the approval process.
City council this week approved changes to its CDBGrant application for fiscal year 2025 funds.
“Over 70 percent of these funds must benefit low- and moderate-income residents,” Rayburg said, adding that 75 percent of Arnold’s population comes from that demographic.
As a result, he said, “Every area of the city is able to use these funds.”
When the application was formed last June, the fund allocations were: $50,000 for firefighting equipment; $100,000 for the replacement of a malfunctioning sewage pump station; $10,000 for a handicap accessible restroom at Roosevelt Park; $8,600 for payment of an outstanding loan; $30,000 for code enforcement; $50,000 to renovate a T-ball field into a playground; and $54,000 for administration of the grant.
The new allocation breakdown eliminates those two uses while increasing the pump station share of funds by about $96,000, according to Rayburg. The additional funds include the $60,000 from the eliminated projects and about $36,000 from the money earmarked for administration of the grant.
He said transferring the administrative funds became possible after the grant application languished for the last six months of 2025, meaning nobody was being paid to administer it.
The pump station replacement is expected to cost about $475,000 and city officials are hoping to add money from a pending state grant to the CDBG funds to cover the cost.
Meanwhile, Rayburg said, the city will try using a special wheelchair-accessible portable toilet at Roosevelt Park and will seek other grant sources to build the playground.
Personnel turnover in the Arnold community development office resulted in Rayburg coming back. He said that’s also why the 2025 application, which was initially formed at a public hearing last June and should have gained final approval at a second hearing in July, remained unfinished.
He said the city’s share of CDBG money amounts to just over $304,000.
