Lawton City Council to decide about closing city parks

City Council members may be ready to make a decision today on which Lawton park space no longer will be used for recreation.

The city’s Parks and Recreation staff spent months last year and into early 2023 analyzing each of the City of Lawton’s 72 parks, areas that either are full-blown recreation areas with amenities or open space included in the parks inventory. Those parks/space total 656.9 acres and are spread throughout the city, requiring a level of maintenance that a parks and recreation analysis — and city staff — said can’t be achieved with the current staff. The solution was paring down the city’s inventory, a process city staff launched with the help of Halff Associates, the private firm that crafted several recreation-related master plans for the City of Lawton.

Parks and Recreation Director Christine James said the process started with a goal of reducing the park land held by the city by 100 acres, through a process that identified entire parks that could be repurposed and removed from the city inventory, or their acreage trimmed to more manageable levels. Repurposing could mean selling the acreage at auction, returning it to those who dedicated it to the city in the first place, or offering neighboring property owners the option of taking the land.

The resulting proposal features 19 parks totaling 52.4 acres that would be repurposed entirely or trimmed to smaller sizes. Only Ward 8 in west Lawton escaped those recommendations. By contrast, Ward 1 in north Lawton has five parks recommended for the repurposing list, while Ward 7 in south Lawton has four.

Two advisory boards already have seen the presentation and offered opinions on the list. The Parks and Recreation Commission endorsed city staff’s recommendations.

By contrast, members of the City Planning Commission (who advise the council on issues pertaining to zoning) said in April they didn’t have enough information to make a recommendation. But commissioners did offer one suggestion: consider a decision to repurpose Tomlinson Park along Northwest 38th Street separately from the other parks because there could be some backlash. Commissioners said residents in the adjacent neighborhood were furious about a previous proposal for selling that park for commercial development because the empty tract had been dedicated to the City of Lawton specifically for recreational purposes.

That 4-acre tract stretches along the east side of Northwest 38th Street, south of Greer Park/Kid’s Zone, and developers have said the tract is prime development land because of its size and location.

“We got into trouble with the neighborhood before,” Planning Commission Chairman David Denham of the Tomlinson tract, adding that keeping that park space as part of the entire repurposing package “will tie up the whole package.”