Lighting park like Danville eyed for city

By the time it begins to look a lot like Christmas next winter, Greencastle Park Board members hope Robe-Ann Park begins to look a lot like Danville.

Although the City Park Department has received kudos for its increased Christmas decorations at Robe-Ann this holiday season, there is much work to be done if the city wishes to rival the displays of Danville’s Ellis Park or Terre Haute’s Deming Park. But that doesn’t mean Greencastle can’t at least get started, park officials agreed.

The topic arose at the January Park Board meeting Thursday night at City Hall when ex-officio board member Wayne Lewis, alluding to taking his family to see the holiday display at Ellis Park, asked, “Is there anything in the long-range plan for Big Walnut Sports Park?”

“Not Big Walnut,“ board member Tim Trigg advised, “but Robe-Ann. We’ve been talking about doing it for a couple of years.”

Trigg, in fact, listed developing the holiday displays as something he would like to stress for the park’s 2017 park agenda.

The plan to ramp up future Christmas activity at Robe-Ann Park, he said, certainly would be on a “smaller-scale version” of what has developed at Ellis Park, just north of U.S. 36, on Danville’s east side.

Park Director Rod Weinschenk and others took a field trip to Danville in December 2015 to see the Winterland Light Show firsthand and noted that the lighted loop through Ellis Park reportedly boasts more than one million light bulbs in a community tradition at least 20 years in the making.

Danville apparently began the event as an all-volunteer effort and continues with unpaid community members aiding seven or eight park town employees in making it happen. Set-up alone requires two months of labor, Weinschenk noted, while volunteers man the entrances and monitor displays nightly, collecting a per-carload charge.

“We could do something certainly on a smaller scale,” the park director agreed. “We could start small and we’d need volunteers.”

One idea would be to use the Robe-Ann holiday display as a contest with entrants possibly renting spots and competing for prizes.

Regardless how it transpires, Weinschenk suggested it would be “open to anybody who wants to put a decoration in there.”

“It should be a citizen-run event, not a city-run event,” he said. “That would help us stay out of the church-and-state issue.”

For the second straight January, Park Board members took no official action on the matter but encouraged interest in the project, expressing optimism over its potential for greater exposure for the park.

In other business, the Park Board:

-- Heard Weinschenk report that the Youth Basketball program will begin its schedule of games on Jan. 14. It currently has 162 players, the exact same number of participants it had last year at this time. Weinschenk expects a handful of latecomers to swell those ranks.

-- Learned that a Winter Walk and Talk at the DePauw University Tennis and Track Facility began Wednesday with 12 participants. The free program continues 8-10 a.m. each Wednesday and Friday through Feb. 24.

-- Heard that the park’s annual Snow Sculpture contest has produced a half-dozen entries thus far, a good start after last year’s contest had no entries due to the snow-shy winter of 2015-16.

Joining Park Director Weinschenk and board member Trigg for the meeting were Park Board President Beva Miller and board member John Hennette along with ex-officio Lewis and Assistant Park Director Phil Cornelius. Board member Cathy Merrell was absent.

The next Greencastle Park Board meeting will be Thursday, Feb. 2 at City Hall, starting 30 minutes earlier than normal (7 p.m.) because of a board planning retreat to follow the meeting.