New neighborhood park gets OK from Canby City Council

Published 4:06 am Thursday, July 24, 2025

Council OKs $2 million contract for new park on Locust Street

There’s a new park coming to Canby in the near future, a park nearly 20 years in the making.

That was the good word from Jerry Nelzen, public works director, during the July 16 Canby City Council meeting.

And with it, the council gave the okay to Ordinance 1651, which authorized interim city administrator Randy Ealy to enter into a contract with Konell Construction and Demolition Corp. to the tune of just over $2 million for the park.

“I’m excited to finally bring this forward to the council,” Nelzen said about the new park at 2041 N. Locust St., right next to the Auburn Farms subdivision. “It was a property that was given to us in lieu of SDC fees to build a park there back in 2006 or 2007. We’ve been trying to build it ever since.”

Nelzen lauded the efforts of the Parks Advisory Committee and Economic Development Director Jamie Stickel in helping to move the project along to this point.

The layout of the new Auburn Farms Park.

“We reached out to the community and were have to have the Auburn Farms community HOA fully involved in all of this,” Nelzen said, who noted that the rendering shown at the meeting was not quite what it will look like when the project is completed. “We kind of ran low on engineering money because we had so many change and public outlook.”

When completed, the park, which came in with a bid of $2,090,927, will feature gazebos that match those at the splash pad, benches, picnic tables, trees, a soccer field, basketball court and other amenities.

Council Daniel Stearns passed along a question he’s been asked a lot by the community – How come this has taken so long to bring to fruition?

Nelzen said there was a combination of factors involved in the nearly 20-year delay, including personnel shortage, awaiting the parks maintenance fee money to bring people on, and getting the parks master plan updated “so we could use the SDC funds to fund this. The last couple of years that’s what we have been working on, getting the master plan updated so we can do this. That’s the main reason.”

Stearns followed up by asking if there were other park projects out there that have been delayed this long?

“Not that long, but they are getting there,” Nelzen said. “We went through a period of taking land for parks, then we stopped. Now, we are really monitoring what types of land we take in.”

Nelzen said that the city received 10 bids on he project “and we got some awesome prices. We actually budgeted $3.3 million for this project because everything was coming in so high. We came in way under budget on this, so that’s even better.”

And with that, Canby City Council approved the ordinance by a 5-0 vote. Ealy told the council to stand by for groundbreaking news in the near future.