By Sunayana Prabhu
LITTLE SILVER – The sound of construction work may accompany children’s squeals in some borough parks soon as significant improvement projects get underway this year.
Several years in the making, plans for the revitalization of Dominick F. Santelle Park and Sickles Park – hindered by the pandemic – are back up to speed. Additionally, a grant provided funds for construction of the town’s first municipal rain garden.
Santelle Park
The improvements for Santelle Park have been a “perpetual work in progress that we improve as we can afford it,” Mayor Bob Neff said. The borough put kayak racks on the waterfront and, a few years before that, a tot-lot with playground equipment was installed at the park. The current improvements will include new restrooms, pickleball courts, additions to the dock, landscape improvements and other upgrades. The total cost of improvements for the park is around $325,000. Funding received so far for the project came together from three different revenue sources: $60,000 from Little Silver’s open space funds; $127,000 from the state; and $60,000 from the Rumson Country Club.
Neff explained that the club was working on a project that was “infringing on the wetlands” and in order to proceed with the project they were asked by the New jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) to fund another project in the area to “increase accessibility to the waterfront.”
“None of the expense of Santelle Park is coming from current tax levy,” Neff said. Construction should start in the fall.
Sickles Park
Plans for Sickles Park are back on the table after the pandemic derailed it. Neff said the park is about to get a facelift very soon. The borough plans to reconfigure the entrance/ exit and parking areas. The total amount proposed for the improvements at Sickles is around $476,000. The borough has received an Open Space Grant in the amount of $74,000 from Monmouth County Parks System for Sickles park improvements.
There are currently two entranceways into Sickles Park: One is a larger intersection directly across from the Woman’s Club and the second one is a small one-way entrance in front of the Parker Homestead. Neff said the idea is to make one safe entry and exit for the park. Additionally, the main parking area and the parking area adjacent to the playground is being reconfigured to “target the overflow parking” that occurs during events, “particularly Saturday mornings,” Neff said. “You get people who can’t fit in the main parking lot and they’re parking across the street, and you got kids running across the street.” The goal of the Sickles Park project is to “make that whole area a lot safer,” he said.
Improvements are expected after traffic-related approvals from Monmouth County.
Little Silver’s First Municipal Rain Garden
The Little Silver Environmental Commission received an Open Space Stewardship Grant from the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions (ANJEC). The grant helped build the borough’s first rain garden at the Challenger Field parking lot on Parker Avenue.
“We applied for it to put a rain garden over at one of our playing fields, because there’s some problems with stormwater runoff,” said Bonnie Winters Akey, chair of the environmental commission. The borough-owned property was vacant and unable to absorb stormwater runoff, she said.
The grant was awarded in 2022 for the garden to be planted by June 1, 2023.
The garden is a collaboration among the borough’s departments of recreation and public works and a Rutgers Master Gardener. Local volunteers, including residents who created a plan for the garden and students from Red Bank Regional High School, came together May 6 to do all the planting and finishing touches. The sand and soil were donated by Ryser’s Landscaping; public works excavated and installed it. Sickles Market helped source all of the plants and provided them at a “highly discounted price,” said Akey. The plants are mostly native, perennial and highly resistant to deer, Akel noted, “because deer considering flowers around here a salad bar is a chronic problem.”
According to an environmental commission statement, “rain gardens, or bio retention facilities, are designed to increase the absorption of rain runoff by the soil. They also act as stormwater run-off filters.”
Rain gardens can help improve water quality, provide localized flood control and look great.
The article originally appeared in the June 1 – 7, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
