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Mono council says Lloyd Armstrong Park is an asset

March 13, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Mono council is looking at how an underutilized park area can be repurposed.

Mono resident Anthony Hosein asked town council during its March 11 meeting about any plans for the Lloyd Armstrong Memorial Park at 30 Sideroad east of Seventh Line. He asked if the town plans to sell it and how much of the tax levy goes to the park, which he called underserviced and underutilized.

It’s a three-acre park, featuring a baseball diamond with such accoutrements as a backstop and bleachers. It has a picnic shelter and tables and a pair of horseshoe pits.

Councillor Ralph Manktelow said there are no plans for the parkette’s sale.

“It’s probably true that it is underserviced or underutilized, I should say, at this time,” he said.

Selling town property isn’t an issue to be taken lightly as land doesn’t readily become available to the municipality, he said.

“It’s going to decrease if we sell things and not come back,” Manktelow said.

The park is an asset to the town and should be maintained, he said. Though there is a baseball diamond at the site, it has been used in the past for a number of things. And, he said, other things will come up for the site in the future.

Manktelow suggested ridding the town of the park may lighten the load on annual budgets. But, given the way of such things, there’s likely something else that’ll present itself next year that could be cheaper to just offload.

“My personal preference is to hold onto this piece of property,” he said. “It’s an asset. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do but selling it would give us some money now and then we have the same problem next year.”

“We have been looking at how to redevelop it and what to do with it,” Coun. Melinda Davie said.

Les Halucha, Mono’s treasurer, said money allotted for the park has been kept to a minimum. Basically, not much above cutting the grass and safety inspections.

“What also complicates this is it was named Lloyd Armstrong for a reason,” Halucha said. “It was donated by the Armstrong family, so that complicates selling it as well.”

Mayor John Creelman said there’s a process to selling town land that involves declaring the property as surplus and there’s a public process to that.

“We have not obviously triggered that activity but we have discussed a number of potential future uses,” Creelman said.

Coun. Elaine Capes said the Lloyd Armstrong Memorial Park is an asset that can be rented to the public for various events.

“We did not talk about selling the property,” she said.

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