San Antonio City Council on Thursday signed off on funding agreements that green-light several new recreational spaces in San Antonio.
In an area where nature is harder to find, an anticipated new park now will be bigger than originally planned.
It also has an official name honoring a San Antonio resident who died in 2021.
Proposed for the South Texas Medical Center, the new park will be located at 8500 Oakland Rd., near Floyd Curl Drive. It was initially planned as 16 acres.
The city’s 2022 bond program authorized $3.25 million for construction of the park, to include land acquisition, park connectivity and site amenities.
On Thursday, City Council approved a funding agreement with the San Antonio Medical Foundation that expands the planned park by 1 acre and accepts a contribution by the foundation of $1.1 million for the project.
Those funds bring the total project budget to $2,468,515.
The park will be named the Lisa Starr Rosenstein Park, said Foundation President Richard Perez.
The 53-year-old was killed by a hit-and-run driver while jogging along the Loop 1604 access road in far North San Antonio.
The park will bring recreational green space to an area of the city with the least amount of public park space per capita, Perez said.
A city planning document lists two public parks in the area — Denman Park and Oak Hills Park — and privately-operated running trails at the UT San Antonio Health Science Center and USAA.
“The STMC is home to world-class hospitals, specialty care and groundbreaking research that attract patients from across South Texas and beyond seeking hope, healing and recovery,” he said. “We will soon be able to add a world-class park to that list and offer another important treatment to help promote recovery.”
The new park also will connect with a proposed Huebner Creek Greenway trail and trailheads, and $100,000 of the foundation’s contribution will be spent to upgrade the playground with a shock-absorbing rubber surface.
Brackenridge nature playscape
Another park plan in the 2022 bond program was advanced by council with approval of a funding agreement with the Brackenridge Park Conservancy.
In 2022, voters approved $5 million in bond funding for the park’s Sunken Garden Theater at Brackenridge Park.
But because that project was delayed over community objections to a redesign, the city asked the conservancy to shift bond dollars to the planned nature playscape at the sprawling and historic urban park, said Chris Maitre, CEO of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy.
“This will be the first project that the conservancy will be able to launch and add for the park’s benefit,” Maitre said. The conservancy is contributing $4.3 million toward the project.
A goal to improve the theater is still in the works, he said. However, the planning and community engagement process has not yet started, so estimates wouldn’t have been ready in time for a 2027 bond election.
“That allows [the city] to have more capacity to offer in the 2027 bond,” which is expected to be about half of the 2022 bond, Maitre said.
The council also approved reallocating $300,000 from the city’s tree mitigation fund for the playscape, which will be built in the northernmost area of the park.
In addition, in December 2024, City Council approved $3 million for the conservancy’s playscape project, funding that will come from the Midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone.
The total park project budget for design, construction and contingencies is now $12.6 million.
Designed by landscape architects Hoerr Schaudt of Chicago, the playscape is intended to encourage physical activity, discovery and exploration through features like logs, limestone and climbing structures made from natural materials, according to a council memo.
The playscape design also provides inclusive playground elements making it accessible for both children and adults. It will include a water feature that mimics the San Antonio River, a hillside amphitheater with slides, an Indigenous camp, a log tangle play structure, a canopy walk, an archeology dig site and a large multi-person rope swing.
Several play structures will reflect the park’s 1800s frontier era.
A pedestrian bridge across the river is planned along with a new restroom building, revitalized picnic nodes, trees, landscaping, walking paths and sidewalks.
Construction is expected to begin in late June and completed by summer 2027.
Fort Sam Houston trail
A 3.7-mile gap in the Salado Creek Greenway trail system will be bridged with a plan to create a trail at Fort Sam Houston.
A 10-foot-wide, concrete-paved greenway trail will span from the John James Park to Jack White Park, connecting trails north of the military installations and south. The project includes trailhead amenities, traffic safety beacons, signage and striping.
Most of the funding for the $1.3 million project will come from the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s transportation improvement program, which is supported by the Texas Department of Transportation. The city will pay the remaining construction costs.
The project is under design and construction is expected to start in summer 2027 with completion in fall 2028.
