BMX park will finally be built at Sturt Reserve

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After more stops and starts than a nervous kid at the top of a dirt jump, the Murray Bridge council has finally agreed to build a BMX park at Sturt Reserve.

Councillors voted in favour of the project at their last meeting for 2025.

Councillor John DeMichele said it was time to get on with the job after years of talking.

“This is something we need, and the location fits well with what we’ve got,” he said.

The council has budgeted $230,000 for the project, on top of the support staff will provide throughout the design and construction process.

Locals like long-time proponent Shea Reddington will play a key role, too, helping with design and liaising with contractors Spry Civil Construction.

He told Murray Bridge News he was “ecstatic” that the park would finally go ahead.

“The youth of the town need something to do,” he said.

“Otherwise they’re just going to go around and do dumb s***.”

The park will be built between the existing skate park and the still-vacant Riverscape Restaurant.

It will feature both a dedicated track and a less formal “activity space” with various jumps and ramps.

“The old toilet block across from Riverscape, we’re going to demolish that, and the track is going to go through there, loop around and run alongside the treeline so we’ll have a bit of shade,” he said.

“There’s a lot of beautiful lawn there … we want to preserve that as much as possible, and the council is going to make it aesthetically pleasing with mulch and garden beds so people don’t complain that it’s just piles of dirt.”

The BMX park should be completed by December of this year.

Dirt park has been a long time coming

A generation of teenagers have grown into adults and had children of their own in the time it has taken the council to reach this point.

Murray Bridge’s BMX riders were originally displaced in 2018, when an expansion of the Sturt Reserve skate park led to the removal of a series of dirt jumps which had existed there.

Several young people made an appeal to the council’s community advisory committee in 2020, asking for a new spot where they could hang out.

The council got some consultants to draw up designs in 2021-22, but the proposed site at that time – at the back of Sturt Reserve, near the corner of Jaensch Road and Charles Sturt Drive – proved unpopular during a public consultation.

At one stage the dirt park was going to be part of a new play precinct which will soon be built at the reserve, but that didn’t pan out, either.

Several other sites were also considered, including Homburg Park.

Finally, almost 800 people signed a petition which Mr Reddington presented to the council in 2024, urging them to get on with it.

One stumbling block had been the project’s cost, originally estimated at $474,000.

“It was never going to happen at that price,” Mr Reddington said.

“You could built a house for that, a small mansion.”

The council applied for various grants, and was still waiting to hear back about an application to the federal Regional Precincts and Partnerships Program at the time of publication.

In the meantime, Mr Reddington said he and the council had been able to bring the cost down by planning to use local contractors and locally sourced dirt.

There were even volunteers, BMX people, keen to come up from Adelaide to lend a hand, he said.

The council anticipated it would spend $30,000 per year maintaining the park: rebuilding jumps as they wore down, fixing furniture if it became damaged and watering garden beds.

Mr Reddington will meet with council representatives next month to plan a start date.