As our community matures and young families come to call Strongsville their home, it becomes essential to provide amenities for every age demographic. Our City’s Master Plan states that it would be very advantageous to create an area in the center of our town to help attract new residents, increase home values, and support local businesses. This would essentially be a space to bring young and old together creating a City neighborhood.
Last year I created legislation that was passed by council (Resolution 2020-023) to hire an outside consultant to study and develop an extensive plan on how we move forward in creating an innovative downtown area. The following is what would be studied:
- Additional Parking
- Connection and integration of existing center of town amenities and venues
- Enhanced lighting
- Multi-use landscape ideas
- Appealing signage
- City Hall
- Fire Station
Strongsville Recreation and Senior Center
Currently, our Rec Center operates at a loss of $7,500 a day. The Rec Center was built in 1987, a time period that deemed us pioneers for establishing such a spacious health and fitness facility for our residents. Since that time, traditional Rec Centers have been up against increasing competition and are very expensive to operate and maintain. The Town Center Study will help us explore new creative opportunities for our Rec Center to benefit the next generation and at the same time save our tax payers money. It is important to invest in an outside consultant to look at our downtown through a different lens.
Long-Term Vision
The long-term vison is one of a destination area with the following amenities located in the area of the ball diamonds adjacent to Safety Town:
- Splash Pad
- Outdoor theater
- Jungle gym that would accommodate our kids of all ages including with special needs.
- Adult Fitness Zones
- Life sized Checkers, Chess, Jenga, Bocci Ball, and Horse Shoes
- Pavilions
- Tennis courts/shuffleboard
- Putt-Putt
- Bark Park
- Multi-Purpose trail throughout the amenities connecting Freedom Trail and Backyard Preserve
- Create and implement a streetscape improvement plan for public enhancements such as common street furniture, light poles, unique signage, street trees, decorative medians, pocket parks, and other elements that match our design guidelines per our Master Plan
I believe having these types of amenities will make our homes more marketable and valuable, give our young families opportunities to occupy their little one’s time, give our seniors an area to interact with our community, make our city more aesthetically pleasing and a quaint but vibrant downtown area to be proud of. Once a viable plan is in place, I will work alongside our administration, business community and residents to fund the project. The financial burden of this entire project would not weigh on our community tax payers.
Several years ago, I started the “turf committee” to turf the high school and middle school fields. Through working hand in hand with our business community and residents we raised $1.6 million in four months and today we have fields our student athletes are proud of. Fields that can be utilized all season for multiple sports, gym classes and are able to be used by the community for various reasons.
“Together We Can make a Difference”
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