Portage Parks eye future after levy passage

The Portage Park District has big plans for the future with new levy funds.

The levy, which passed Tuesday, will begin in 2024 and be charged to homeowners in 2025. The 1-mill, 10-year levy will collect an estimated $4.54 million per year for the park district, costing the owner of a $100,000 home $35 per year. This levy is a replacement of the 0.5-mill levy that will expire at the end of the year.

The levy passage will help the park district continue to grow, said Christine Craycroft, executive director of the park district.

“There’s a lot of wonderful projects and parks on the horizon,” she said. “We’ve got trails to extend. We’ve got new parks to open, new land to conserve.”

Next year, the park district will prepare to open new parks and trails by starting engineering plans for the Kent Bog Expansion, which was acquired in 2017, and planning for the extension of the Headwaters Trail to Aurora.

“Now that we know we’ve got some good funding coming in, we’re going to be doing a lot of planning next year,” Craycroft said. “We’ll be able to hit the ground running.”

The levy passed because the parks are valuable to the community, Craycroft said.

“We offer a great thing for everybody,” she said. “It’s something everyone can enjoy, all ages, all abilities. I think people are finally realizing what we do and are taking advantage of our programs and our parks.”

In addition to recreation, having a well-funded park district is one way to protect nature, park commissioner Renee Ruchotzke said.

“If you look at a map of Northeast Ohio in 1970 and over time to today, you can see that there was a lot of wild area and farmland area,” she said. “There’s a fraction of that today because of development.”

Opening new parks also helps conserve water resources, she said.

“It’s not just about tree-hugging,” she said. “It’s really about providing for the future to make sure that we have sweet water to drink.”

Preservation of wetlands is especially important because they allow rainwater to replenish the groundwater people drink, Ruchotzke said.

“It’s really important that we serve especially wetlands, they’re the percolators. It’s just like pour-over coffee, you want it to go through the ground,” she said. “We survive on groundwater.”

The levy funds will help continued maintenance and growth that was started with the previous levy, said Sally Kandel, volunteer and chair of the Citizens for the Portage Parks Levy Campaign.

“The park district has worked so hard over the past 10 years and I think the voters saw that,” she said. “I think they see the value that this is something they need to support for their community.”