Fond du Lac’s McDermott Park has been selected for a program through the University of Wisconsin Madison to develop an improvement plan for the park. Nancy Sondergard with the group Friends of McDermott Park says their application was accepted for the UW Madison School of Landscape Architecture Capstone Project. Sondergard says McDermott Park is one of only 13 projects selected for this year. “We submitted our application in mid-August and we waited with bated breath until the middle of September when we were advised that the McDermott Park project was one of those chosen,” Sondergard told WFDL news. Sondergard says the project will involve a full life-cycle development with the first phase focusing on analysis, study, research and identifying the issues. “They spend the entire first semester looking at what the state of the park is, what the comparison benchmarks are from both a local and regional perspective. They look at what the potential issues are,” Sondergard said. Friends of McDermott Park was formed in response to a proposed lease agreement between the city of Fond du Lac and Winnebago Lutheran Academy that would have allowed the private school to build athletic fields and ball diamonds on a portion of the public park. WLA withdrew from the plan after widespread public opposition and learning the proposed diamonds would have been in a flood plain.
