The Rotary Adventure Park is inching closer to completion. (Dawson Thompson/paNOW Staff)

By Rob Mahon

Rotary Adventure Park

Fundraising nearly finished for Rotary Adventure Park

Jun 22, 2022 | 5:00 PM

A new attraction at Little Red has been a long time coming, but the Prince Albert Rotary Club is getting closer to seeing their centennial project coming to fruition.

With the latest contribution from the Prince Albert and Area Community Foundation ($29,250), fundraising for phase one of the Rotary Adventure Park is almost wrapped up. The park will be out at Little Red when it’s completed.

“That will help us actually finalize our fundraising campaign and bring us to the end of our campaign,” said Rotary Club President Keith Fonstad. “It was fantastic to get the grant from the foundation.”

Play equipment, picnic sites, walking trails, and more are on the list of features for the park. It’s a big undertaking, but it won’t be long before families are able to enjoy it.

“The plans are virtually completed,” Fonstad said. “The construction for the play equipment was started on May 25. It’s about halfway done I would guess. We’ll see what the river cresting in the next day does for any delays if it gets wet. We’re projecting to have the play equipment completed sometime in July.”

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From there, other components will go in throughout the summer and into the fall. By the time fall is over, the Rotary Club believes they’ll have everything on the west side of the riverbank all wrapped up, including a new parking lot the city is working on.

“It’s our centennial project,” said Fonstad. “Our club turned 100 years old on March 1, 2020. So we started planning for this in probably 2018 or 2017… So it’s been quite a process to get this far. The project, so far, will be well over $1 million so we’re really, really excited to get to this stage.”

If the date March 1, 2020, sounds like an ominous time to begin a construction project, that’s because not quite two weeks later Saskatchewan and the rest of the country began to deal with the effects of the pandemic.

“It definitely delayed it by about a year from where we had planned to be, especially on the construction and planning side of things,” Fonstad said. “What COVID did do for us, we were able to change up some of our fundraising events. Through COVID, with the fantastic support of the community, we were able to do three or four take-home meal events.”

Fonstad added they raised as much money if not more than usual during COVID thanks to the generosity of individual donors and sponsors.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP