Brooksville’s park bathrooms now close at 9 p.m. It’s a small line item, but it’s the one concrete decision that came out of an Oct. 5 City Council workshop built around a much bigger question: how to get more people actually using the parks the city already has.
Parks and Recreation director Jared Marsden opened with a year’s worth of usage and participation data before the council started floating ideas, and the ideas ranged from modest to a genuine reshaping of two city properties. Council member Thomas Bronson raised a volunteer maintenance position for the parks; the board didn’t reach consensus on it. JW McKethan suggested inviting disc golf organizers to run tournaments at The Quarry and pushed to turn McKethan Park into a fitness-focused space with durable outdoor gym equipment.
The biggest idea came from Louis Hallal, who told the board he’d met with a prospective developer interested in a private-public partnership: an amphitheater built at The Quarry, and a TopGolf-style driving range experience on the site of the old driving range.
One honest caveat worth sitting with: this was a workshop, not a vote. Nothing here — not the amphitheater, not the TopGolf concept, not the gym equipment — is funded, designed, or on a council agenda for approval yet. A developer being interested in a partnership is also a long way from a signed deal; Brooksville residents have watched bigger ideas than this stall out before reaching a shovel.
What is real: the bathroom hours, and a council that’s apparently willing to entertain reshaping The Quarry and McKethan Park rather than leaving them as-is.
Photo: Brooksville City Hall, by Ebyabe, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.