A community organization from outside Warren County is donating playground equipment worth around $175,000 to the Wright City Parks Department. City leaders are cheering the act of generosity, along …
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A community organization from outside Warren County is donating playground equipment worth around $175,000 to the Wright City Parks Department. City leaders are cheering the act of generosity, along with the work of local businesses donating their time and equipment to get the playground set moved and installed.
The playground set is used, but is less than five years old, city officials said. They said the community organization donating the playground asked to remain anonymous.
The donation was facilitated by Alderman Nathan Rohr’s employer, a regional construction company. Rohr explained that a client of the company is replacing their playground, and Rohr asked if all parties would agree to donate the playground equipment to Wright City.
“It’s five times the size of any playground we have put together,” Rohr estimated. “That will be huge for us. It’s very nice.”
Eventually all parties agreed that they would rather see the playground repurposed than for it to go into a landfill. The only requirement on the city government was that it needed to provide all the labor and transportation to get the playground moved from its location to Wright City. That was done over about a week in July, with the added help of two local businesses, said City Administrator Jim Schuchmann.
Schuchmann and several public works crew members spent days disassembling, labeling, and transporting the playground’s many pieces into temporary storage. During that process, staff from Sellenriek Construction in Jonesburg volunteered time to conduct a GPS survey of the playground’s structural posts, creating a digital map that will be used to accurately reassemble the playground at a new locatoin. Sellenriek, the employer of Wright City Alderman Michelle Heiliger, is also providing free warehouse storage for the playground set until it is reconstructed.
Transportation of the playground components was done using a U-Haul truck donated by Wright City Liquor, which is the city’s local U-Haul dealer.
Schuchmann said he and the rest of the city leadership are extremely grateful for the donations of every entity involved in making this happen.
“This whole thing was everybody saying, ‘If it’s for the kids, we’re in,’” Schuchmann commented. “Wright City’s got a history of that. When it comes to doing something for the children and the community, when you say ‘We need help,’ the community is there to say ‘What can we do?’”
Schuchmann said exact plans for the newly donated playground set haven’t been determined yet. It could be installed at a future park that will be developed on Westwoods Road, or it could replace the existing playground equipment at Diekroeger Park on Veterans Memorial Parkway. If the second option is taken, any of the Diekroeger equipment that’s in good shape would be moved to a different location in Wright City, Schuchmann said.
