Residents hope Indian Hills upgrades will bring more users to park

Columbia Missourian

COLUMBIA — Residents should be seeing a much different Indian Hills Park in 2017.

The Columbia City Council on Feb. 6 could vote on a plan to spend $100,000 to fix up the park in northeast Columbia. Plans call for repaving the trail that winds around and cuts through the park to improve access for people with disabilities. The work also will include new parking lot lights, improvements to the park's disc golf course, new playground equipment and a new infield for the baseball diamond.

"We always like to work with our user groups to make sure we are meeting those needs," Gabe Huffington, parks and services manager for the Parks and Recreation Department, said.

The trail improvements will also provide better access to the dog park adjacent to the parking lot. Neighborhood resident Christina Byrd said she often brings her two German shepherds to Indian Hills to play.

"It's usually not as crowded and not as many people or dogs, so there's not so many chances of someone bringing an aggressive dog or a dog fight happening," Byrd said. "A lot of times, we'll be the only ones there."

The park's disc golf course, which covers nearly half of the park, also will get a facelift. New signs will help eliminate player confusion, Lance Fritz, vice president of the Columbia Disc Golf Club, said.

"The course is very wooded. It's basically that nine of the holes are just trails through the woods," Fritz said. "It's a really easy place to get lost. You get back in the woods and you get turned around really fast. The signs will help immensely."

The course also will get better tee boxes, and the city will replace two bridges. A single-table shelter with a message board and bench seating will be added on the first hole to serve as a headquarters for tournaments.

Improving the disc golf course will pay off, Fritz said.

"There's interest in the sport," Fritz said. "If we can draw even just one major tournament it would help spur the growth of the sport here and make everything worthwhile from the city's perspective."

Disc golfers might be more interested in the Indian Hills course once the work is done, Fritz said.

"Indian Hills is probably the least-known of the disc golf courses in Columbia," Fritz said. "Albert-Oakland is really popular — it's got two courses, it sees a ton of traffic — and the new course over on Strawn Road, Harmony Bends, is a fantastic new course. But Indian Hills may be the most unique course of the three parks."

Disc Golf Club treasurer Mark Ehlert said the fact that the park has few users actually is somewhat of a benefit.

"As a group of disc golfers out there, you don't have to worry quite so much about throwing a Frisbee and hitting a walker or someone just out playing in the park — so, it's a little more secluded, little less traffic," Ehlert said.

Still, Ehlert said, more people in the park would make it feel safer overall. Byrd, too, hopes the improvements will draw more folks.

"It would be kind of nice if it wasn't so empty," Byrd said. "Overall, it would be beneficial in many ways just to try and get more people attracted to the area."

That, in turn, would boost the entire neighborhood, Byrd said. "If we surround it with dogs and children, it would improve the neighborhood more so than hurt it."

Byrd said the new parking lot lights also will make park users feel safer. "It does get really dark there really quick."

The park is part of an area targeted by the city's 2016-2019 strategic plan. This area and two others were marked for focus in the plan due to social equity issues and high poverty, Third Ward Councilman Karl Skala said. According to the city's plans, the three neighborhoods will receive investments and higher engagement from the city.

"We have a couple of people working on this who actually go door-to-door and assess whether or not people need additional help — what they want to see in the neighborhoods and so on and so forth so we can address the issues of some neighborhoods that need a little bit more help than others and have been neglected in the past," Skala said, referring to Glenn Cobbins and Judy Hubbard.

In addition, the city will hire minority workers to complete the construction, Skala said. 

"It's part of that whole program, the strategic plan, as well with social equity," Skala said. "We passed a resolution to start looking toward minority contracting and participation. We will be looking at that not only for this parks project but across the board."

Money for the project will come from the 2015 park sales tax that was approved by voters.

"It's a community park for us, which means that people will drive to Indian Hills to utilize that park," Huffington said, "so we want to make sure we have a lot of different amenities, and we think we've accomplished that goal with the project."

If the council approves the plan, the work will be done over the summer and completed sometime in late fall, Huffington said.