The Crookston Park Board held a community brainstorming session Wednesday night in Bede Ballroom at the University of Minnesota Crookston (UMC), and the most significant development from the session was the plan to establish a task group for strategic planning for an event and wellness center for the City of Crookston. The meeting began with talking about the what those in attendance were proud of with Crookston’s facilities which included things with unique opportunities like Castle Park, the potential of facilities like Highland Park, being one of the few communities outside the metro with three sheets of ice, the increased boat access, campus, the new weight room at the Sports Center and others.
Park Board member Becky Kofoed, who facilitated the session, then shifted the discussion to brainstorming about what the City of Crookston needs in the future. Topics ranged from smaller scale park upgrades such as restrooms to larger projects like a wellness center, turf fields, and a sports bubble. Many spoke in favor of a facility that encompassed wellness, events, and indoor turf options for dealing with the often-wet falls and springs occurring in the area. Chris Fee talked about the football stadium built in Marshall, Minnesota with the cooperation of the University, school district, and city, that included $11 million in state bonding and $5 million locally saying he had in the past spoken with former Representative Bernie Lieder about whether a similar type of facility in Crookston would get support at the state level noting that Lieder expressed confidence it would.
Scott Butt, Parks and Recreation Supervisor and Crookston High School Football Coach, also talked about the need in the community for an improved football facility citing that the University of Minnesota Crookston won’t be able to play their final three homes games at Ed Widseth Field because the rain and tear on the field have made it unplayable. Butt said many local schools have had to battle for time for games on the turf field in East Grand Forks and at Cushman Field in Grand Forks adding that if Crookston had a turf field, the demand for it would extend beyond the local teams. Fee also added that adding a bubble to a turfed field during the winter would help with space for other groups listing many communities throughout the multi-state region, especially those with universities such as Minot State, St. Cloud State, and Concordia-St. Paul among others with college softball teams heavily utilizing them in the spring.
City Administrator Shannon Stassen, Park Board member and Crookston Baseball Association Treasurer Mike LaFrance, and others also spoke about numerous groups or members of the community talking with them about the need for such a facility in Crookston to train. The group determined that the interest was there for a task group to explore what a facility could consist of and begin doing some strategic planning for it, according to Parks & Recreation Director Scott Riopelle. “After a couple of hours of brainstorming with a lot of good thoughts from A to Z, the thought was to put together a task force that we can talk about an event & wellness for the community,” said Riopelle. “What we mean is it would have turf in it. It would have all types of activities and sports was my feeling from what I got from everybody, so we don’t leave anybody out. Hopefully, we can make it a regional type center people to come to from the area and utilize it as well. We’d like to get people on board from the different entities, whether its service clubs, sporting clubs, activity clubs, the school, the college, and the city. We’ll have a meeting sometime in November to get them in a room, do some strategic planning, and go from there.”
A focus through the discussion was that a facility should have the ability to be used by as many different types of sports and events as possible, which Riopelle said would not only be a good addition to the community but would bring people into the community as well. “You would have turf, sports floors in there, so you could have soccer, football, baseball, golf, even possibly using it,” said Riopelle. “We didn’t want to leave anybody out. And I think part of it was to try to have an area with space for weight training. Whether it’s a bubble or four walls are yet to be determined, but it would be a great addition to the community and bring a lot of people into the community.”
Where would funding could come from? One recommendation, from acting Mayor Dale Stainbrook, was to connect with the people who were instrumental in the building of the Sports Center so as not to reinvent the wheel. Another question was asked regarding who would be responsible for being the lead on such a task group, and Stassen suggested that the City of Crookston was probably the best suited in the community to lead such an endeavor. He also added that partnerships in planning and moving such a project forward needed to include invested groups in the community as well as the Crookston School District and UMC. Riopelle said the plan would be to reach out to those groups and bring them together for a first strategy meeting sometime in November. “From here we will send [information] out to the different user groups and plan, and plan an evening looking at a Wednesday night again because there usually aren’t any sporting events,” said Riopelle. “We’d meet in a room similar to as we are now at Bede Ballroom and get these people together to talk about what they’d like to see in there, and how are we going to arrive at that. How are we going to get to that? We’re going to have to look at financing it down the road. And include any type of activity. We’d want tennis in there and the pickleball people, we could have space for them as well. We’ll need a couple of weeks to put this together, but while it is still hot, we want to start planning and go from there.”
Many other topics on a less grandiose scale were also talked about, such as more increased restroom facilities in parks, to turf and a grandstand at Karn Field, to electricity and water for park shelters, to using parks such as Franklin Park in the Woods Addition for neighborhood fields. Also included were trails adjacent to the river, additional launches for canoes and kayaks, rental equipment including canoes and kayaks, and specialized handicap equipment in parks. Riopelle said those smaller items would be added to the list of improvements for Parks & Recreation that is used for determining the five-year plan and yearly capital improvement projects. “Those other items, we have so much we put in each year,” said Riopelle. “Some years there is more available, other years less. We’ll sort those things out and make priorities again. Maybe change our five-year plan a little, and we can do some jockeying of a few of those items to make more things happen in the community hopefully.”
KROX will share information regarding the creation and meetings for the task group to conceptualize and plan an event and wellness center as that information becomes available.
