City receives grant to make repairs at Cypress Grove Park

Christi David has served for two years as the City of Jackson’s park operations manager in the parks and recreation department.

One of her primary roles in the department has been to look for and apply for grants to help the City gain funding for needed projects for its parks throughout the Hub City.

One of the City’s most unique parks just picked up significant funding to help with some much-needed improvements that have been necessary for years.

“We’ve been awarded a $392,000 grant from the Tennessee Outdoor Recreation division of the TDEC to rebuild a section of the boardwalk that’s been closed for several years now at Cypress Grove Park,” David said.

The City had to close down about a quarter-mile of boardwalk in the park that’s called the Jewel Weed Loop that goes around Killdeer Pond in the park.

“The park has a number trails that are boardwalks, but some of them weren’t elevated,” David said. “This portion wasn’t.

“So when the park was flooded more than once within a fairly short period of time – just a few years – those floods did a lot of damage to those boardwalks, and they had to be closed.”

David said there have been efforts in the past to get the boardwalks fixed at different places, but funding and timing have been difficult, along with the environment.

“A couple years back when a small tornado blew past the park in March, we put out a request for proposal for work to be done on the boardwalk then,” David said. “But all of the vendors that we knew that could do the work that didn’t answer the RFP, we reached out to them and made sure they’d seen it.

“They had, but they all had the same problem. This was in early spring that we were asking for the work to be done, and no one wanted to go into that area and do that work because of all the snakes in the area, so we couldn’t get anything done then.”

With the timing of the grant awarding, which will be partially matched by the City to increase the funding to $515,000, David said she hopes to work with A2H about designing the boardwalk next spring, send out the FRP about this time next year with hopes of having the work begun late fall/early winter of 2025 and completion done before spring of 2026 while snakes are still hibernating.

This work is part of the larger plan to make the park more ADA compliant and restore the boardwalks to all parts of the parks.

“We’ve got elevated boardwalks through the park already that aren’t closed, and people can still enjoy those,” David said. “But I know a lot of people miss being able to take a walk around the pond and go out on the dock, which will be redone in a later phase of the plan.”

David said the City of Jackson was one of eight entities selected for the grant and the only one in West Tennessee.