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Community weighs in on Camas’ Crown Park

Interactive water feature, inclusive playground among possible options

By Kelly Moyer, Camas-Washougal Post-Record
Published: July 8, 2022, 3:26pm

Community members in Camas are letting city officials know what they believe is most important when it comes to revamping the city’s historic Crown Park.

More than 1,300 people participated in an open house survey focused on the future of Crown Park, and more than 1,000 people weighed in on a survey on the possibility of building a new sport court at the park.

Crown Park, 120 N.E. 17th Ave., near downtown Camas, hosts a bevy of city-sponsored events, including the annual Easter egg hunt and the Camtown Youth Festival, which resumed June 4 after a two-year hiatus during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Camas Parks and Recreation Director Trang Lam told Camas Parks and Recreation Commission members June 22, that the public outreach was part of the city’s 30 percent design process — the first step in fulfilling a Crown Park master plan OK’d by city officials in 2018.

The 30 percent design process, Lam said, involves gathering community input on proposed, major-features options, such as an interactive water feature, sport court and inclusive playground.

Later this summer, city staff will incorporate that community input — as well as direction from the Parks Commission — to come up with a 30 percent design package, Lam said, before adding in directions from the Camas City Council and attaching cost estimates to those designs.

Lam said she plans to discuss the results of the Crown Park surveys with the city council later this summer, before bringing more information back to the Parks Commission.

Some preliminary survey results show community members:

  • would prefer to see a sport court with both basketball and pickleball inside Crown Park;
  • want city officials to think about water conservation if they build an interactive water feature;
  • would like to see interactive water features have elements, such as ground sprays, elevated spray features, a creek bed, bubblers in rock, a hand-pump activator and a water table;
  • want to see a blend of natural and formal elements in an interactive water feature;
  • preferred nature elements over sensory panels and musical instruments when ranking sensory play items that could be included in a future inclusive, all-abilities playground; and
  • would like to see other elements incorporated into a Crown Park remodel, including: benches/seat walls, picnic tables, shade areas, open lawn areas and bike racks.

Though some Camas community members have been vocal about the need for city officials to replace the former outdoor swimming pool at Crown Park — which city officials closed and demolished in 2018, after weighing the high cost of bringing the pool into compliance with state health and safety codes against the benefit of having a pool that was open to the public for 10 weeks out of the year — Lam said this sentiment was not reflected in the recent Crown Park outreach.

Lam said she plans to have a larger “Camas pool” conversation with members of the Camas City Council later this summer and warned that — even if the city partnered with a nonprofit, such as the YMCA —it could be another decade before Camas had a public swimming pool.

In the November 2019 election, Camas voters overwhelmingly (90-10) knocked down the city’s proposal to build a $73 million community-aquatics center that would have added an indoor recreational swimming pool, as well as a competition pool to the city’s public facilities.

“The pool discussion is slated for the Council’s July 18 workshop,” Lam said, adding that the discussion will be very preliminary, with the Parks director sharing research and data with city officials. “Council just needs to know at this juncture what it might take (to build a pool) and give us a head nod if they want to invest in this conversation.”

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