Upgrades include safe rubber flooring, climbing bars and jungle gyms with slides, bridges and ladders.
One question that’s kept popping up for the past few months at township council meetings and on the township’s Facebook page is when will the new playgrounds at Laurel Acres Park be open?
Now curious residents are closer to an answer than ever before.
According to township officials, the township hopes the long-awaited upgrades to the playground will be complete by the end of next week.
Although township officials were hoping to have the project completed by late spring, Mt. Laurel Township Manager Meredith Tomczyk said at a recent council meeting that the project was delayed several times due to stretches of rainy weather.
Tomczyk said certain parts of the project required the ground to be dry to continue with the installation, and this year had enough rain to delay the project’s competition past the start of summer.
According to previously released information about the project, the upgrades have mainly been focused on replacing the park’s ageing playgrounds with new equipment that would be safer and more accessible to children or families with disabilities.
Those upgrades include new climbing bars and jungle gyms with slides, bridges and ladders.
Tomczyk said the new playgrounds are also set to feature a rubber material for their flooring that’s safer and softer than the previous playgrounds’ wood mulch flooring.
According to Tomczyk, that flooring is another part of the reason why the upgrades have been pushed back, as the rubber flooring requires nine days of dry weather to pour, with any wet days pushing the process back an additional day.
“They can’t pour the rubber if it rains, so it pushes it back another day,” Tomczyk. “As soon as that rubber dries after the nine days, the playground should be open.”
Tomczyk said the rubber is the last major component of the playgrounds, aside from some small last-minute improvements such additional tables, trash cans and fencing to enclose the new playground equipment.
Aside from the new playground pieces, the township has also installed a second pavilion at the park to meet demand from residents.
Officials say the park’s original, single pavilion often booked a year in advance with residents and other organizations looking hold events such as picnics and birthday parties.
The upgrades at Laurel Acres are also unique as the project was the first to be funded from a change in rules to the township’s open space tax that residents approved in November 2017.
Before voters approved the change, the rules of the township’s prior open space referendums were written so narrowly that the township could only use money collected from its open space tax to purchase new properties.
Until the change in rules, the township could not use open space funds to upgrade any improvements to currently-owned properties. Instead, any upgrades to open space properties owned by the township had to be funded using grants or money from the township’s regular municipal budget.
In addition to the playgrounds, township officials are also promoting this year’s first summer concert at Laurel Acres Park on July 19 set to feature The Jersey Boomers from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m.
