Mills Township to start maintenance on local parks
By Greg Buckner
Staff Writer | reporter@ogemawherald.com
Follow me on Twitter
MILLS TWP. — Improvements will made to the Pipeline Park area along the Rifle River after the Mills Township Board voted to approve a improvement project.
At its Aug. 14 meeting, the board voted 4-0 to replace half of the rails on the walkway at the park and to stain the handicap accessible ramp at the park. Trustee Ethel Hight was absent from the vote with an excused absence.
According to Township Supervisor Lloyd Saunders, the project is estimated to cost close to $1,500 and will be paid for by funds from the townships’ allotted parks and recreation budget.
“Some of the rails down there are rotted out and we were going to replace all of them, but we realized we only need to replace half of them,” Saunders said. “I guess the handicap accessible ramp down there hasn’t been stained in a long time either, so we’re doing that too.”
Saunders said he believed the park, which is located at the end of Mills Road near the Rifle River Trail, was built in 1992.
He said work has already been done at the park this summer, with the trail to the area being cleaned up and other maintenance being performed.
“We’ve done some maintenance down there already, but we still have some work to do,” Saunders said. “It’s a really nice park. A lot of people like to go there. It’s a beautiful area.”
Saunders said the work being done at the Pipeline Park is the beginning of a project that will have the township performing similar maintenance projects on other parks along the Rifle River.
He said the township would like to have all of those projects done by the end of this year, but they’ll focus on them one at a time.
“We want to take one little park at a time and perform some maintenance on all of them,” Saunders said. “We had looked into trying to get some grants from the DNR to perform these projects, but we just couldn’t find any. So we’re just going to start it now and hopefully get them all done.”