City parks and recreation -- a valauble community asset

I have visited and used several of our parks recently and thus elected to use this venue to highlight one of our most valuable assets. Our community quality of life is greatly enhanced by our expansive parks and recreation system. Many do not realize Cape Girardeau has 23 parks that cover over 662 acres. They are very well maintained and offer numerous amenities. I would encourage our citizens to use our city website to learn more about our park system.

I recently entertained family from the St. Louis area and visited Cape Splash with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We thoroughly enjoyed our time there on a hot evening along with hundreds of other "splashers." While on the way home, we drove through Arena Park, observing a very crowded park with families' and youth enjoying all of the amenities. The following day took us past Capaha Park, where we observed a similar crowd using all of the facilities.

I bid my visiting family farewell at the end of the weekend and while catching my breath and resting that evening, I began to recall the many events related to these areas that I have been involved with recently, and thus decided to write about our parks and recreation department. Our leaders and staff do a tremendous job maintaining and promoting an expansive system.

Several months ago we celebrated the opening of the new shelter and children's playground at Capaha Park. We cut the ribbon last month on a quality renovation of a shelter at Kiwanis Park along with an adjacent playground. Other current construction at Kiwanis includes a new shelter next to our dog park and a new restroom being added in the area of the shelter next to Perryville Road.

I attended and gave a welcome to a state convention of Lutheran women earlier this month at our Osage Centre. That facility adequately hosted that convention of over 500 women. While waiting to be introduced, I pondered the tremendous flexibility of that venue. Osage hosts many sporting events including basketball, volleyball, pickle ball and more. The meeting rooms are always in use for community meetings and events. The state-of-the-art fitness facility is widely used by citizens. Many of these same amenities are available at our community center at Shawnee Park Center, and the Arena Building hosts many other events throughout the year.

Our trail system continues to expand and our citizens and visitors can now enjoy over four miles of walking and biking trails. We dedicated this month the new bridge over Sloan Creek adjacent to the state conservation river access area. This opens the trail on the river side of the flood wall from that new bridge down to the River Campus area. The trail system also features a continuous trail from Shawnee to the Conservation Campus Nature Center at Cape County Park North.

The Jaycee Golf Course has been completely renovated, hosts many thousands of rounds of golf per year and features new greens, tees and challenging amenities.

The above comments are not an all-inclusive list, but rather highlight only a part of the tremendous assets that we enjoy here in Cape Girardeau. Many of these new and renovated facilities have been made possible through the parks/storm water sales tax approved by you our citizen voters. I thank all of you for your decision to further invest in our city in this manner.

My final comments, as I close, are to again recognize and thank our staff for their dedicated service to our parks and recreation department. They do a tremendous job under the leadership of director Julia Thompson, parks manager Brock Davis, recreation managers Scott and Penny Williams and their entire team to include all of our part-time staff.

Harry Rediger is the mayor of Cape Girardeau.