Wright City administrators have released a digital rendering of what a 62-acre park on Westwoods Road may one day look like.

The preliminary rendering shows an athletic complex of four baseball fields that would be situated in about 20 acres at the front of the park, which is at the corner of Westwoods Road and Wildcat Drive. Also included are a paved entry roadway, parking, playgrounds and pavilions around the ball fields.

City administrators say this athletic complex will be the first phase of park construction. Future development at the park will be broken up into later phases.

In the rear 40 acres, situated in a wooded area, the new rendering shows the park road extending and connecting to surrounding neighborhood streets. A network of walking trails, basketball and tennis courts, and more playgrounds and pavilions are included in the plan.

Mayor Dan Rowden emphasized that this is just a preliminary look at longterm plans for the park. The project was initiated in 2018 after Wright City used money from the sale of its water and sewer utilities to purchase the park land for $1.2 million.

Rowden said a new park is a big desire among city residents.

“It’s going to be the largest park in our community. ... It will be a park that everybody in the community can use,” Rowden commented. “For my wife and I, the walking trails are something we’re looking forward to. For young people in the community, it’s the ball fields and having multiple playgrounds.”

The earliest plans for the park initially included several soccer fields. But Rowden said input from parks staff and the city park board led to a design that focused on a baseball complex that could be used to host athletic tournaments.

Soccer fields of different sizes can be added to the empty field south of City Hall on Westwoods Road, Rowden added.

No date has been set for when the first phase of park construction will begin. Final engineering for paving, utilities and park construction is ongoing, and how much work can be done will depend on what the estimated cost ends up being, Rowden said.

Wright City currently has $1.5 million set aside for park engineering and construction. Rowden said the eventual cost of development will likely be multiple millions of dollars. It’s a project that will still take some time to see completion.

“We’ve got to make sure we’re following the right process ... making this big of an investment,” Rowden said. “We ask the community to be patient with us. We are moving on this as quickly as we can, but these kinds of projects take much longer than people think.”