On Wednesday night, despite rain and near-freezing temperatures, the community gathered to celebrate the official opening of Sunset Point Playground.
For Ray and Wyn Smith, the celebration was bittersweet.
The couple donated about $60,000 to construct the Harvest Table Pavilion, one of many features of the new park. The donation was made to honour their late son Thom, who died in 2019.
“We’ve been in Collingwood for 45 years. We wanted to give something back,” Ray told CollingwoodToday.ca.
“They’ve done a marvellous job of the landscaping and the park is just gorgeous,” he said.
At least 100 people were in attendance for Wednesday’s event, which featured a ribbon cutting, a poem read by Collingwood’s Poet Laureate Jillian Morris, a drum circle and pizza.
Since 2019, the town ran consultations with public groups to build a plan for the playground site to replace the structures that were built in 1993.
The cost of the playground project totalled about $2.6 million according to Dean Collver, director of parks, recreation and culture. He said the washroom building cost about $450,000.
The funding mostly came from the town's development charge reserves, which is set aside from the fees paid for new residential and commercial units built in Collingwood. The town received $1.17 million in other funding including a donation from EPCOR to the tune of $150,000, and $750,000 in gas tax allocation. Collver said there was another funding amount of $270,000, the details of which will be announced later.
About $324,000 was drawn from the town's lifecycle reserve for the project.
