Hope Church in Algood moving forward with a different upgrade and expansion plan after city council voted not to close Wall Street.
Pastor Jason Yarbrough said they originally had asked city council to consider closing Wall Street for safety reasons. He said architects are now moving forward on designs with that not being possible in mind.
Yarbrough said there had been plans in the works for some time to upgrade the church’s 20-year-old playground equipment, as well as to potentially expand community recreation.
“So we demoed an old building that was on part of our property to start making space for all of it,” Yarbrough said. “So the new playground, hopefully state of the art we’re going to make it as nice as possible, not just for our folks but for the community as a whole, is going to be adjacent to our building. And the big thing about that is that kids won’t have to cross the road.”
Yarbrough said if all goes as planned, they would like to add a splash pad as well. He said they still are in the development phase and are awaiting cost estimates. Additionally, there are plans to include an outdoor amphitheater for performances and a lot of green space.
Yarbrough said despite the fact that the city council denied the Wall Street request, they still hope to have a good working relationship moving forward. He said they understand the city’s concerns about having too much traffic on the road to close it.
“We are going to be working really closely with the city going forward on traffic control measures for that location,” Yarbrough said. “We actually had someone come down from Brotherhood Mountian not too long ago, blow through the stop sign, blow through everything at the other part of Wall Street. They took out our retaining wall and landed down about 40 or 50 feet in our lower-level parking lot. So all that to say, we are concerned about kids’ safety on that road.”
Yarbrough said they hope to hear back soon about the first part of the work. He said Phase I will be the playground.
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