By Adam Swift
For the second time in the past three months, the City Council approved a resolution that will allow the city to apply for a state grant to help pay for the first phase of the Gibson Park improvement project.
“If you think you have been here before talking about this resolution, it’s because you have,” said Tom Skwierawski, the city’s Chief of Planning and Community Development at last week’s council meeting. “In June of this year, I brought a similar resolution before you regarding Gibson Park. It’s basically a formality when we submit PARC (Parkland Acquisitions and Renovations for Communities) grant applications to the state that a resolution must be passed by the City Council stating that, in effect, because it is a reimbursement grant, that we have the money to front the development of the project before the PARC grant reimburses us for the balance.”
What is different with the Gibson Park project compared to past PARC applications is that for the past applications, the PARC grant covered the bulk of the improvements.
“In this case, the $500,000 we’d receive would be but a fraction of the $2-plus million project that will be taking place at Gibson Park,” said Skwierawski. “So originally, when we put the motion in front of you in June, we had just picked out a few discrete items that correspond to the grant application, such as turning the baseball diamond into an all-purpose field and adding lighting fixtures and adding an ADA accessible (walking path).”
Those items totalled about $700,000, Skwierawski said.
But he added that the city does have the money necessary to cover the first phase of the project through an ARPA allocation that came through during Mayor Brian Arrigo’s term. The new resolution passed by the council essentially shows that the ARPA funding is in place to complete the project.
Skwierawski said the city also has state and federal funding in place and is seeking additional funding for the larger overall Riverfront improvement project that will see a new Rte. 1 roundabout that will keep excess traffic away from the Gibson Park neighborhood, and environmental resiliency and flood mitigation efforts for the neighborhood.
