The public playground at Riverton’s Aspen Park is being replaced, city staff reported last week.
The playground equipment has already been removed, city administrator Kyle Butterfield told the Riverton City Council during a regular meeting last Tuesday.
This week, public works director Brian Eggleston said his crews are “in the process of installing the (new) playground now.”
“They just have to wait for the concrete to set up on the posts,” Eggleston said Monday. “They’re working on it.”
The new playground will be surfaced with rubber mulch as opposed to sand, but otherwise, Eggleston said it will be similar to the previous structure, which was identified for replacement because it was “starting to show its age.”
“It was time to get that old stuff that was starting to fall apart (replaced),” he said. “It wasn’t a tremendous hazard, (but it was) not … overly safe.”
The city also removed a large tree from the area that posed a risk to people at the playground, Eggleston said.
“Branches were falling off of it all the time, and it didn’t make for a real safe environment,” he said. “They got the big tree out of the way so it’s not going to be dropping limbs on that (playground) anymore.”
He added that the roots of the tree were also “surfacing enough that they were tearing up concrete as well.”
The Fremont County School District 25 Recreation Board contributed almost $13,000 to the $21,000 project, Eggleston said.
The rest of the money came from the city’s general fund, he said, and in the form of in-kind labor and equipment from the operations division.
For more information call the City of Riverton at 856-2227.