MIDLAND, Texas — Beal Park is about to get some renovations after the City of Midland approved a three-phase project at Tuesday's city council meeting.
Midland City Council heard a presentation from other city officials detailing what would be included in the project, before making a vote of approval.
The new renovations will come with new and expanded soccer fields that will give kids who play soccer some better fields to practice on.
Soccer is currently one of the fast growing and most popular youth sports for young Midlanders, as over 3,000 kids currently play in the Midland Soccer Association.
“We are looking forward to this opportunity to have a phased development plan to go ahead and take care of those capital improvements to expand our soccer fields and all other facilities there at Beal Park,” Midland Mayor Lori Blong said.
The total cost is projected to be around $36 million. An estimated $26 million to come from the city and another estimated $10 million will be through private donations.
The three-phase development plan has been in the works for the better part of a year now, which gave city officials enough time to properly assess what needed to be done to complete the project.
“We talked about the plans about a year ago so we've been working with an engineering firm to develop the face plan, then we started working on the presentation just about a couple of months ago on how we wanted to put that together," Interim Community Services Director Laurie Williams said. "We started out with five different phases and we've condensed that down to a three phase project and we trying to get that done as quickly as possible.”
The first phase of the project is centered entirely on making sure the soccer fields at Beal Park are up to date.
“The first phase is predominantly the irrigation and expansion of play space of competitive soccer," Mayor Blong said. "So we'll be adding that irrigation and redeveloping the turf so that it's appropriate for children to be playing on it.”
Phase Two will see more additions brought to Beal Park, such as a splash pad, amphitheater and more bathrooms.
Phase Three will see greater expansion being geared towards more parking and a potential RV park.
However, it's not just current soccer players and teams that the City of Midland has in mind regarding the new fields.
“In the bigger picture. we also want to be able to bring tournaments and to bring those soccer teams from around West Texas and then even beyond back to Midland to have soccer tournaments and that type of thing in this facilities,” Williams said.
Meanwhile, development will hopefully be rather smooth, as this was the first step in getting the project off the ground.
“We hope to break ground on this project in October of 2024. and that first phase should take about eight months to get that completed to where we can start having those first games out there,” Williams said.