by JONATHAN YORK
When he was growing up in San Antonio, Kerry Urbanowicz had to cross Loop 410 to walk to school.
“There was a drainage culvert,” Urbanowicz said, “so we would go through there, and you never knew if you were gonna get beat up or bit by a snake.”
That experience must have been formative, because the parks and recreation director is doing what he can to ensure that Kyle’s schoolchildren don’t have to brave the snakes and bullies.
Urbanowicz is building a set of walking trails to connect the subdivisions in the southeast part of town, making it possible to do what you can’t do right now – walk from one to the next without stepping into traffic.
The walking trails will be one component of a parks system called the Plum Creek Preserve. The preserve also includes Lake Kyle Park, set to open this spring. Not only will it provide walking access between subdivisions and schools, but this project will also connect roughly 400 acres of parkland that are being developed with donations and grants. The trails will cover between seven and eight miles.
“There are no city dollars involved except for us having to be working out there,” Urbanowicz said in an interview earlier this month. “That’s why it’s taken me forever to do it.”
One typically frugal approach is the way that the parks department has been coming up with mulch for these trails. Since October Kyle residents have been able to drop off dead trees and brush, as well as Christmas trees that have worn out their welcome, at designated spots in Waterleaf, Steeplechase and Gregg-Clarke parks.
Workers have been turning the trees into mulch. They have until March to build as many trails as they can. Then they will have to turn their attention to Lake Kyle Park.
What Kyle needs: fishing
Lake Kyle opens in March. It will be an undertaking. The park will include a stocked fishing hole, a wheelchair-accessible trail, an amphitheater, horseshoe pits and a picnic ground, as well as the new offices for parks and recreation.
Urbanowicz said he certainly looks forward to spending his afternoons on a lawnmower instead of in an office chair. All the same, the new park’s functions and conditions will require a high degree of maintenance. It will be like running a state park, he said, but it will belong to the city.
Unlike a regular city park, Lake Kyle will be open only when staff is present. There will be strict rules about what visitors are allowed to do: for instance, no pets, no smoking and no alcohol. There will also be rules about what the workers can do. While there will be signs warning visitors of snakes, the parks department isn’t allowed to kill those snakes.
These rules are in place because a little more than half of the money used to build the park comes from a state government grant with high standards for natural preservation.
Urbanowicz thinks that the new activities will be exciting enough, even if people can’t bring their dogs or crack open a beer.
“We’ve never had a place in Kyle where you can go fishing or where you can go hiking,” he said.
A walk around the trail
In the hot middle of last fall Urbanowicz took this reporter on a quick tour of the partly complete walking trail. The mulch was soft underfoot, and you could see the arches of trees receding in front of you and behind you, dark green against the prevalent ashy brown of the dead leaves and brush.
The trails follow the course of Plum Creek, which wasn’t much to see that day. What water was there had a green film over its surface, the same kind of algae that the parks workers wanted to keep from invading Lake Kyle.
All the same, the trail was full of pleasant shade. And for a town where you can nearly always hear the highway or the railroad, it was quiet enough to imagine being in the woods.
After getting back in his car, Urbanowicz smiled. “I tell people I don’t get a chance to build parks and build a city too many times in my lifetime,” he said. “This is it.”
By the numbers
Kyle Parks and Recreation Department released its annual report for the 2011 fiscal year:
2,924.09 Number of city acres mowed
2,211.34 Approximate number of football fields that would be
1,198.88 Number of miles that the Parks Department has trimmed
1,184 Approximate number of miles from Kyle to Chicago
549 Number of plastic mits dropped off at Dog-E-Doo stations
68,320 Estimated weight, in pounds, of trash picked up from city land and rights-of-ways
6.21 Number of average-weight male elephants that would be
