Foremost splash park to open in August

By Justin Seward

Commentator/Courier

While the Foremost pool is officially closed for the season, local families will be able to beat the heat for the last month of summer with the new splash park opening in August.
Village foreman, Trevor Ferguson, said Aug. 1 will be the opening date.
Construction began in May and the village is now waiting on the manifold to come in.
“That’s taking some time, a couple of weeks, to get that part ordered,” said Ferguson.
“We still have to do the fencing (arrival ofJuly 15) and get the turf in.”
As soon as the splash park is done, the village can open it, he added.
“There’s no restrictions (and) just the sanitizing part of it,” he said.
Staff will wipe the splash park down after each day.
The project is two years in the making and had incredible support from local individuals and businesses.
“The project really got started from the member of council, Blake Klatt. He really mobilized people to get behind it and it just happened to come by me and it was something I really wanted to get behind too,” said Carrie Butterwick, splash park volunteer committee member.
“We had some really good local fundraisers. With that money in hand, the village put together an application for the Community Facilities Enhancement Program, which is a matching grant from the government. Once we got the matching grant approved, we went to work on designing the facility within the budget and came up with a proposal.”
The proposal was then brought forth to council and councilors provided some feedback and approval was made earlier this year to start construction.
The Sage Club donated the land for the spray park beside the pool.
“It took a lot of people to see the value in it in the community for it to come together,” she said.
Butterwick said while the pool is great, the shallow end measures four-feet deep and there is not really anything there for small children, other than one-on-one swimming with their parents.
“It was really nice to have something for the younger kids,” she said.
“To me personally, I worked as a life guard, sometimes swimming is scary for people. But they still want something to do with water and want to be able to hang out with their friends. A splash park seems to be a nice compromise, plus it’s actually, to me, very inclusive.”
The committees anticipated to have the splash park open this year before the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.
“Pre-COVID, we were hoping, but we weren’t anticipating that we would be operational this year in the pool season,” she said.
“If the project is completed and we are unable to open this year, we’re still pushing ahead with it because we know eventually we will be able to.”
The project cost $300,000.

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