Lend Your Voice to Spencer’s Future Park Projects
Town of Spencer seeks community feedback on future parks and recreation projects, starting with January 24 and 31 open house sessions.
SPENCER – The Town of Spencer is launching a series of public engagement opportunities to start the new year, with public feedback on future parks and recreation projects first on the list.
For many years of its history, the community enjoyed a vast central park filling the block of Salisbury Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Streets and Yadkin Avenue. Although this space was redeveloped into the Park Plaza shopping center in the 1960s, the Town’s project to acquire and renovate a portion of the shopping center for Town use included a vision of restoring some of the parking lot into a park.
Originally, park development was within the Town’s scope for its new Town Hall and Police Department Project, which was constructed in 2021 after several years of planning. With the project funded by a USDA loan, the park was removed from the scope to bring the project within budget. The project was rebid in 2020 without the park, and Vertex Construction substantially completed the new Town facility over the past year.
With a generous donation from Fred and Alice Stanback to begin planning, the Town is now ready to advance the goal of a new central park at Salisbury Avenue and Fifth Street. In the coming months, the Town will update its 2014 Parks and Recreation Master Plan and apply for grant funding to help make this vision a reality.
Two upcoming drop-in sessions are planned to gather input from interested citizens and stakeholder groups as an important part of the overall plan update process. The Town also wants to hear what type of amenities and conceptual design features should be included in the proposed central town park. Town staff and consultants will be available from 3:00 until 6:00 p.m. on Monday, January 24 and Monday, January 31. Both drop-in sessions will take place in the new Town Hall at 450 S Salisbury Avenue, Spencer, NC 28159.
The Town plans to continue the parks and recreation master plan update process with a community survey starting in February. Additional efforts over the coming months will seek feedback on community pandemic impacts, prioritization of eligible uses of federal ARP local fiscal recovery funds, and information to support a forthcoming update of the Town’s land use or “comprehensive” plan.