City working on changes to Solomon park changes

Solomon Park is undergoing some major renovations to meet requests and concerns of neighborhood residents.

Thursday night, Dothan Leisure Services Director Elston Jones met with city officials and residents who live near the park to discuss the changes, which address most of the concerns residents raised at previous meetings.

The city plans to put wood fencing around the park to prevent children from running into the streets, improve the wording on signs across the park and completely remove the existing playground equipment.

“It’s a wood structure playground, and the life of those is somewhere in the range of 15 to 18 years, and we’re there,” Jones said. “Of course we were going to remove anything unsafe, and as a committee tonight , we decided we’re going to remove all of the old playground and come back in phases and add the new playground equipment we have in all the other neighborhood parks in the community.”

One problem the city has already begun to address is parking.

Residents complained for months that the lack of properly marked parking spaces was leading to illegal parking, so the city has already created 33 marked parking spaces.

Now, however, in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the city is using the space once used for a tennis court to provide two off-road handicap parking spaces.

Originally, even more parking spaces were going to be added, but that changed after the meeting.

“We hoped to put in additional parking with the handicap parking, but the committee tonight indicated they were in favor of the handicap parking but not so much the additional parking,” Jones said.

The changes left most of the residents relatively happy.

“As long as it’s fenced and helps protect the children, we’re pretty much satisfied,” said Nagel Byrd of Camellia Drive. “We don’t want a lot of extra parking in there, but (Jones) has really tried hard to work with the neighborhood, and we’re mostly pleased.”

Jones said his department will also send additional workers to collect trash on weekends.