Chapples Park Master Plan focus narrows

The city of Thunder Bay continues to consider the future of ChapplesPark with everything from minor improvements to existing fields to a large-scale, regional sports hub.

"We're kind of three-quarters, I guess, of the way through the process," Werner Schwar, the city's supervisor of parks and open space planning, said before the second ChapplesPark Master Plan open house, which took place Wednesday evening at the Da Vinci Centre.

"The first public meeting was really about information gathering, giving people a chance to say what they thought Chapples Park should be," he said. "The purpose of (the second meeting) is to summarize what we heard from them, and we have prepared three different options for the park."

The park itself stretches from the Friendship Gardens north across the Neebing River to include Chapples Golf Course, the tennis club, and soccer and baseball fields.

The three options, Schwar said, are:

• Essentially maintaining the status quo, with some improvements to existing fields and a new, central parking lot
• An expanded facility with more fields that meets the needs of Thunder Bay residents
• An overhauled, expanded regional sports hub that could include indoor soccer and tennis facilities

The big difference between options two and three, Schwar said, would be in the number of sports fields available.

"The third option would encompass more of the park, and turn more of the park into active fields," Schwar said. "We want to get a sense from people what they like in each option."

"To some extent, it's more about the components of the options they prefer," he said. "It's not necessarily that one would end up being the end result; it might be a combination."

The city is taking what it heard from the publicand using that to determine a preferred option, as well as a cost estimate.

When that's in place, Schwar said,funding would be requested in a future capital budget process.

The first public meeting about the Chapples Park Master Plan took place in June, and the three options were developed from input gathered then, Schwar said.