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Golf course, skate park nixed for county park

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A golf course and a skate park were eliminated Tuesday from the future Southwest Williamson County Regional Park near Leander.

County commissioners voted unanimously to accept recommendations for future land use in the park presented by county Parks and Recreation Director Jim Rodgers.

The vote came as a part of updating the conceptual plan for all parks throughout the county. As part of that plan, commissioners have embraced recommendations for passive use large-scale parks.

Those parks are intended to resemble state parks, said Rodgers, with more emphasis on camping and trails instead of sports facilities, such as baseball fields and tennis courts.

“The best idea of what won't happen is 12 soccer fields everywhere and 12 baseball fields. We'll leave that to [the] city,” Rodgers said.

Those types of facilities are more city-oriented, commissioners have said, and should be funded by municipalities. Commissioners have stressed that they will still help cities build parks, but that the projects should be undertaken by the cities as opposed to the county.

The golf course had been a pet project of a former commissioner, Rodgers said. But now that the commissioner was no longer on the court, little support remained for the course. The nearby location of Avery Ranch Golf Club and Crystal Falls Golf Course also made a county-funded golf course seem unnecessary, he said.

There may still be a small-scale golf practice facility developed, though it would be nothing larger than a pitch-and-put.

So far, 100 acres of the Southwest Williamson County Regional Park have been developed with tennis courts and soccer fields, despite what the recommendations are now. The entire park is about 800 acres.

The continually changing course of the park reminded Rodgers of the development of Austin's Zilker Park, opened in 1919, that now offers a disc golf course and plays home to the gargantuan Austin City Limits Festival. The original park planners could not imagine what the park would become nearly 80 years later.”

And Zilker is 350 acres. This is 800 acres,” Rodgers said. “There are things that will happen in the park that I have never heard of.”

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