The Great Outdoors Colorado Board announced Thursday it would award a $108,000 grant to the city of Cortez to build six pickleball courts in Centennial Park.
In December, department director Dean Palmquist said he hoped to have the courts finished by August if the grant went through. Local players of the popular sport, which combines tennis, badminton and pingpong, have already raised some matching funds for the courts, and the rest will be supplied by the city’s Conservation Trust budget. Cortez was one of 27 towns and counties to be awarded GOCO grants this year.
The new courts will replace the current tennis courts.
“We’re excited that we can repurpose those courts that don’t get much use from tennis players, and use them to accommodate a more up-and-coming sport,” he said.
About 24 people regularly play at the two pickleball courts in the Cortez Recreation Center, a number that has doubled over the past three years. Right now, the city has no outdoor areas dedicated to the sport.
The Parks and Recreation Department applied for the same GOCO grant last year, asking for additional funds to cover renovations for the park restrooms, but they were turned down. This year, they revised the application, removing the restroom costs, and Palmquist said in December he believed they would do better this time around.
Now that he’s been proven right, he expects construction to begin sometime in May, although the city council still needs to approve the award.
Overall, the projected cost of the new courts is about $183,000. The GOCO grant will cover about 59 percent of that, while $75,000 will come from the Conservation Trust and $3,000 from the money raised by pickle ball players.
The city still plans to renovate the restrooms at Centennial, a project that is estimated to cost $175,000. Palmquist hopes to have both projects completed by this fall.
While it didn’t come as a complete surprise, he said he was pleased to be awarded the grant after two years of trying.
“A lot of hard work goes into all these grant applications,” he said.
The GOCO Board awarded about $5.5 million in grants for parks and recreation projects, including a $255,000 grant to the town of Bayfield to create a park near the Pine River Library. A Thursday press release stated that all the funds came from the board’s local parks and outdoor recreation grant program.
“Funded projects will update aging parks and playgrounds, connect Coloradans to the outdoors with improved pedestrian and bike access and will serve more than a dozen rural and underserved communities,” the release said.
Other regional GOCO grants
Great Outdoors Colorado awarded a total of four grants on Thursday to projects in Dolores, La Plata and Montezuma counties. In addition to the Cortez pickleball courts, the funded projects include:
Mancos: A $110,000 School Yard Initiative grant to Mancos Elementary School to update the playground. The improvements will be based on a design developed with the help of a student task force and a landscape architect, and will include water features, new equipment and an outdoor classroom.
Bayfield: A $225,000 grant to build a park at Pine River Library. It will include a nature-themed playground, a picnic area, a court for multiple sports and an outdoor classroom, and is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year.
Lone Mesa State Park: A $6,008 grant from the new Director’s Innovation Fund to study how wildlife are impacted by outdoor recreation development. The study will count the wildlife species in the park using motion-triggered cameras, and compile information to inform any future development of the area.
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