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City Meeting With Wichita Neighborhoods To Plan Designs For New Splash Pads

City of Wichita
Staff with Wichita Park and Rec showed District 6 residents examples of some splash pad ideas as the city gathers input on the next phase of the Aquatics Master Plan.

The Wichita Park and Recreation department is getting closer to the design phase of its Aquatics Master Plan, which city council approved in February.

Representatives from Park and Rec have been making the rounds at district meetings throughout the city; this week it was District 6, where the pools at Orchard, Evergreen and Minisa Parks will close in the next few years.

Orchard and Evergreen pools will be turned into splash pads. Recreation superintendent Greg Olmer says one proposal has been to turn Minisa pool, near North High, into a kind of river launch.

“Since Evergreen and Minisa are so close in proximity to each other, we just didn't want to duplicate two similar amenities in really close range of each other," Olmer says. "Since [Minisa] is right along the river there, could we incorporate some kind of kayaking or canoe launch, something to help with the amenity with the river being so close?"

Olmer says staff will gather input from other neighborhood groups on splash pad designs. 

The department still has to meet with the advisory board in District 1, where there’s been public outcry to re-open the historic McAdams pool. The city council approved adding $4 million additional dollars to Wichita's long-term spending plan to go toward building another pool in the district.

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Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.