BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

An uplifting story this week at the Board of Mayor and Aldermen. Monday marked fiscal year 2026’s Community Agencies Budget Requests Study Session. It’s the time every year when the city’s community service non-profits and Hotel/Motel Tax funded agencies appear before the podium en masse with guitar cases and buckets to make arguments for why the city should fund their initiatives. Nineteen of them this year—makes for a long night. Perhaps by fortune or perhaps by design, the regular meeting agenda was conveniently light, consisting of only four items.

To begin with the uplifting:

Agenda Item 25-45 – A request from the Parks & Recreation Department to approve the purchase and uplifting of basketball goals from Omnia Partners, contract price of $50,132.20 from BSN Sports. 

The funds requested will go towards replacing D.W. Wilson and C.D. Stamps’ basketball goals with a modern retractable system better designed to make use of the space and accommodate different age groups. As Parks & Rec Director J.P. Kraft explained, “this will replace the two existing basketball goals in D.W. Wilson. They’re fifty years old. One end does raise up but it’s manual, and during the Sports Council banquet the mechanism that raises it…it does not raise anymore. The other end is stationary.” 

Kraft argued upgrading the goals will modernize them and better accommodate different sports and age groups, “I manage a bunch of user groups. Pickleball—they hate the basketball goals. They need them raised up into the ceiling. Junior NBA, they need them to come down to eight feet. So the new basketball goals will stay at ten feet most of the time, but they would be lowered to eight feet for times when we have junior NBA practice or an AAU tournament…This would also add two additional goals, one on each side so we can run another practice.” 

Kraft noted this was an easier fix than needing to build a third gym down the line. More affordable and practical. The money in question will be pulled from the Parks & Rec reserve account for the fiscal year. Former Parks & Rec Director, now Alderman, Kurt Glick, clarified “the goals that have been there since 1975, one of them was stationary, and one of them was retractable. So this one will add two additional goals besides those and all four will be retractable.” Kraft replied, “and also it will make the four at C.D. Stamps and make them adjustable to eight feet. So we will have six goals at C.D. Stamps and four at D.W. Wilson that lower to eight feet.” The item passed 7-0.