Mt. Morris officials hope to complete Zickuhr Park upgrades in 2025

MT. MORRIS – Mt. Morris officials hope to have Zickuhr Park renovations started – and completed – next year.

Components of the redevelopment are a picnic shelter, additions to the existing play structure – including Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant sections – renovations to the half-court basketball area, game tables, a pollinator garden with interpretative signage, fitness stations and a sunset overlook with seating.

“The [Open Space Lands Acquisition and Development] grant that we received is a 50% match, so we had to come up with ideas in that budget,” Parks and Recreation Trustee Jim Hopkins said. “There are a certain amount of items you have to have in the park. We had to have five new items introduced to that park … and then from there, we could do whatever our budget could afford.”

The grant is a state-financed program with dedicated funding through a portion of the state’s real estate transfer tax. It is offered through the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Recipients can get up to $600,000 for development/renovation projects, or up to $1.725 million for acquisition projects, on a dollar-to-dollar match.

In January, the village of Mt. Morris received a $152,600 OSLAD grant to redevelop Zickuhr Park; the total cost of the project is $305,200.

“The only thing left we have for the engineering is one more survey of utilities and sanitary,” Hopkins said. “[That’s] just to make sure, before we put the bids out, that all the contractors know where everything is and to make sure we’re not going to be putting something on top of existing utilities.”

Hitchcock Design Group, the company with which the village contracted for the project, plans to solicit bids from contractors starting Jan. 1, Hopkins said. The hope is to have bids in and ready for consideration by the end of February, he said.

“Then, their goal is, in the spring of 2025, that we start breaking ground, and then hopefully finish by fall,” Hopkins said.

A component the village hopes to add to the park in the next year or two is parking, Hopkins said. They still need to get pricing for that, he said.

“Zickuhr Park has zero parking right now,” Hopkins said. “It’s all street parking. So, hopefully we can incorporate a spot in the northeast corner off of Sunset [Lane] that we could make a small space for five, 10 cars, something like that.”

There will be a “70% meeting” in November, during which village officials will review pricing on a full walking path, he said. That component would have to be funded at a later date, either through fundraising or donations, Hopkins said.

A full walking path around Zickuhr Park was part of the original project plan, but the plan had to be revised when Mt. Morris found out on July 26, 2023 – about halfway through the application period – that it didn’t make the state’s distressed community list for fiscal 2024. Distressed communities are eligible for 100% forgiveness up to $600,000 on the OSLAD grant.

Mt. Morris was listed as a distressed community the past few years, but it came off the list because equalized assessed values increased. With the village’s change in status, it became eligible to have up to 50% of the OSLAD grant forgiven.

As a result, the Zickuhr Park redevelopment costs had to be scaled back from the originally planned budget of $632,000, of which the village would have been responsible for $32,000.