Shovels are in the ground and work is progressing at the back of Lambton-Kent Composite School in Dresden.
Ian Avery, a teacher at LKCS and one of the leads with the Dresden Community Development Association, told the Sydenham Current that phase one for the sports field project is under way.
“Phase one consists of the drainage and irrigation,” Avery said.
“Hooking up to sanitary sewers for a future building. Putting the two irrigated soccer fields together and then obviously the six lane, 400 metre asphalt track and jumping pit. So that’s inclusive within phase one and they broke ground about three weeks ago now. I haven’t had any updates from them but just from visiting the sites, it looks like they are starting to do some of the drainage there and taking the old grass off and starting to level things out.”
Avery said they are hoping to start phase two of project directly after the first phase is completed this fall.
“That will be our washroom and storage building,” he said. “That will be hopefully up and running this fall for use in the spring by our community users and the high school as well.”
Avery added: “Pretty exciting time. Its a busy time. We have a meeting tomorrow to just go over the design of the building and there are going to be some back and forth meeting I’m sure with the school board and our architectural firm and then hopefully we will be ready to put that up as well this fall as phase two.”
Avery said phase one should take about 70 working days.
“Now that was from middle of July so I guess if you put that out, end of September, early October if all weather holds. That’s the plan. Like I said we are hoping to get phase two up and running right after, so that we don’t have to dig twice so to speak. We will see how that goes,” he said.
Avery said their group recently received a Canada 150 Infrastructure grant, which will go towards phase three of the project – the community trail.
“Which will obviously allow people to go about the community sports field but also it is almost like a finishing piece to the Trillium Trail that’s on the south side of Dresden,” Avery said.
“So it will connect all the way from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all the way back to our Dresden cemetery so you can walk the entire town on the Trillium Trail with the extension. We are pretty close in terms of funding that trail. That will be a spring project with the goal obviously to have it completed for Canada’s 150th birthday which is also coinciding with LKCS’s 50th birthday, so that’s our goal. That is going to be on the back burner until the spring and that was always the plan. Once we see the layout and where the usage patterns will be.”
Avery said the fundraising gap that remains is for the baseball diamonds.
“We are going to running some fundraisers this fall, nothing concrete right now, but working towards gaining funding for getting an additional baseball diamond in the corner of the field. That’s going to be, not put on hold, but we do need to get the funding before we can move forward and actually build it,” he said.
“We want to remain optimistic. It’s something we can do in the spring if we were to gain funding. Our community has been unreal in terms of support, obviously the support we had with the matching campaign with North Kent Mutual Insurance, and donations continue to come in. Funeral donations, which is so touching. All sorts of stuff. I visit the school every now and then, there is always something that comes in with somebody that was an LK Grad in ’74 and wants to contribute. So there are still things coming in that we can use and I’m optimistic that we can do the trail and the ball diamond at the same time in the spring, but as of right now we do not have funding for that.”
Watch for more information on this on-going story in Dresden.
– Photo credit: Lambton-Kent Community Sports Field
