ONTARIO — Marshall Park draws in more visitors every year, especially for its tournaments like The Target Cup, according to service safety director Jeff Wilson.
This has prompted city officials to consider expanding the park’s restrooms and concession stand, which are located near the soccer fields.
“(Director of Ontario Youth Sports) Kenn Spencer and OYS have just done an incredible job of growing the youth sports here in Ontario. Our parks are always busy,” Wilson said after last week’s Ontario City Council’s parks committee meeting.
The proposed project would transform the current restroom/concession stand into a larger restroom and turn a nearby pavilion into the concession stand. The pavilion would likely be expanded so it could still include some covered seating space.
The women’s restroom would include three stalls, and the men’s would have two urinals and one stall. At this time, the cost is unknown, Wilson said, as the city anticipates some assistance from Lowes.
“They’ve been a great community partner over the years, and they’re going to help us with material for this project too,” Wilson said. “So until we get the amount of their commitment back to us, we won’t know how much we need to spend. But it will be a lot less than what we had originally planned to spend.”
He and Mayor Randy Hutchinson had proposed a new building be built as a restroom at the park last year. But the project came to a halt when early estimates came back between $120,000 to $130,000.
“(It) would have been a much larger building and probably would have had three or four stalls on either side, and so we went out and got some costs on that, and it was almost like building a house,” Wilson said. “It didn’t make sense. Even though it’d have been great to have, it just didn’t make sense to do that at that time.”
The new proposal, Wilson believes, is more feasible because water and electricity already run to both existing structures.
“Since we don’t have to run infrastructure to a new building and so forth, we should be able to do a lot of this in house,” he said. “Some of the plumbing in the restrooms we may have to contract out, but all in all, it will be much less expensive for us.”
This August will mark the third consecutive year that The Target Cup returns to Ontario’s Marshall Park.
“They only do a select number of tournaments around the country. It’s a really fun weekend, but it’s huge, and the fact that we’ve now been able to host that three years in a row, not only is that very unique, but again, we’re very proud of that,” Wilson said. “It speaks not only to Kenn (Spencer)’s management skills to run a tournament, but also our facilities. When they want to come back, it means they like what they see.”
