Vacaville’s Rotary Club has big plans for a new accessible park in Vacaville; a place where all children can go to play and enjoy each other’s company without anyone getting left out. The plans for this playground are expansive and very hopeful for a great place for children and families for years to come. 

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The design also hopes to create—along with those play structures — an easily-accessible parking lot, a handicap-rules baseball diamond with rubber paths and fake grass for everyone to play, a walking path around the entire park, and a small “town” with buildings for children to play in and wide “roads” marked with signs and lines for them to walk, run, and ride around. This town would be called Vaca Village.

 

One of the most exciting parts of this playground is that Vacaville residents are encouraged to take part and give their input. Vaca Village, along with every structure in the park, is completely customizable and can be made into almost any theme. The village area itself will have large, accessible, open, well-lit buildings for the children to play in. What the buildings look like and what goes into them can be almost anything—from medieval to the old west, or maybe even to represent the city of Vacaville and its businesses itself.

 

A committee of about 35 people has already been formed. Rotary is the main funder, raising money locally and hoping to match fundraising in the district, regional, and even internationally. The plan for this year is to work on the organization of the park including tax redemptions, legal steps with the IRS and state, and focus groups. However, with enough support from the community, there is hope for phases of construction to begin summer of 2019.

 

Phillippi, President of Phillippi Engineering, Inc., has been working in the business as a civil engineer for 37 years. He said that with his 14 grand-kids, he “would like to leave some legacy for the community,” and the hope is that many people in Vacaville feel the same way. A handicap-accessible park would be a wonderful addition to Vacaville for the future and for the children, and the possibility to create such a thing would be a great opportunity.