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Village drops idea of
 relocating playground

FLAT ROCK — Among the ideas for noise reduction at the Park at Flat Rock are sound barriers, plugging a tunnel or moving the playground farther away from a neighborhood.


The first idea may still be in play. But an experiment to plug the tunnel satisfied no one and the cost of moving the playground would be almost as much as the original $260,000 installation, the village says.
Flat Rock Mayor Bob Staton investigated the cost of moving the Beanstalk playground and came up with a total of $227,125, just $30,000 less than the village paid to grade the land and install the structure in the first place.
The Village Council and park planners sited the playground where it did because the facility is part of an overall master plan that includes other play areas and because it needed to be near the parking lot and rest rooms, Staton said. All but a third of the 67-acre park is flood plain, where no structures can be placed.
“Amenities have been planned for all developable areas of the park,” Staton said in a memo. “There is no unused area of the park that would accommodate the playground structure without interfering with another planned amenity.”
The mayor included cost estimates for landscape design and landscaping, grading, drainage work and dismantling and reassembling the Beanstalk playground, which includes four large towers, slides, a climbing wall, catwalks and other features.
“There is no place within the park to relocate the Beanstalk playground structure,” Staton concluded. “If an alternative could be found within the park, any attempt to relocate the structure to another site would interfere with the orderly development of the park in accordance with the master plan. Furthermore, the prohibitive cost of removal, in my view, would preclude any further consideration of the matter.”
He ended with a recommendation that the Village Council close the investigation into moving the playground and “give no further consideration” to the idea.
“I wrote that for the benefit of the council and sent it out to council members,” he said in an interview Tuesday. In a cover letter, the mayor told the council “we need to bring this to a head and here’s my position.” The council took it up at an Aug. 29 meeting. “The council endorsed it and put it to bed, and we have heard nothing since,” he said.
Residents of the Highland Golf Villas have complained about noise from children in the playground. They asked the Village Council to consider moving the playground. The council declined but agreed to seal off the tunnel to see if that would reduce noise. The residents have said the tunnel encourages children’s squeals and shouts.
Mark Stewart, president of the Highland Golf Villas homeowners association, said the neighborhood has come up with no other recommendations at this time.