Frisco Enterprise
By Audrey Henvey | Star Local Media
January 17, 2024

One of Frisco's biggest projects is moving ever closer to reality.  

During its regular meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 16, the Frisco City Council voted to approve a vision statement and guiding principles for the design of Grand Park.

The vision for Grand Park has expanded from roughly 350 acres to over 1,000, including trail networking, meaning the park will essentially be bigger than Central Park in New York City. The project includes 7.8 miles of creek with a good amount of property in floodplain. The land also has ties to Iron Horse Trail.

In 2006, Frisco voters approved $22.5 million in acquisition and initial development of Grand Park, according to a previous article in the Frisco Enterprise. Over time, the story of Grand Park evolved to include discussions of clean up at the site of a former battery recycling plant and negotiations with battery manufacturing company Exide Technologies. The negotiations, which reached a conclusion through a settlement in October 2020, punted hopes of beginning work on Grand Park for an extended stretch of time. A milestone was reached in November 2022 when the city opened “Big Bluestem Trail,” a small portion of Grand Park that is now open to the public. In January 2023, the Frisco City Council named master planning of Grand Park as among its top 10 priorities for the year, and the park is included in discussions for the council’s 2024 annual work session.

In April 2023, the Frisco City Council voted to approve a $394,000 professional services agreement with global design company IDEO to design a vision for the Grand Park project. IDEO’s visioning process included meetings and workshops with community groups as well as a community survey. Since then, a vision statement and guiding principles for Grand Park have been developed “through a combination of the work led by IDEO and synthesized by staff,” according to city of Frisco documentation.

“Grand Park is a world-class urban oasis designed to welcome all Frisco residents and its visitors to an intentionally designed community space inviting all ages and abilities to play, explore, discover, and connect,” reads the vision statement approved Tuesday.

The document approved Tuesday organizes guiding principles as they relate to the key behaviors of play, explore, discover and connect. Guiding principles include “Provide opportunity for all participation levels through amenities” and “curate nature driven partnerships.” A full list of guiding principles is available at this link: tinyurl.com/3xdzhcbt.

In a Jan. 16 interview with the Frisco Enterprise, Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney said the final result came out of a collaboration between council, staff and citizens.

“It is casting that overarching vision of what we want the park to become and what’s going to be our north star as we make guiding decisions along that process,” Cheney said.

Cheney said the vision for Grand Park includes having a variety of “rooms” and experiences that different park user types can enjoy over multiple days. The process of working with IDEO was about trying to think about the project from a different perspective, he said.

“They actually helped guide the process too, about getting the citizen input,” Cheney said. “We had that independent third party where it’s not filtered by our own biases or what we want to see in the park or those kinds of things, and it can truly give us an accurate representation of what this community wants and the bigger vision, and so they were a very helpful part of that process.”

He added that in the end, the outcome was not consultant-driven, but rather community guided.

Now, the city is looking ahead to next steps. Grand Park will be a generational project, Cheney said, and it’s one that entails a large scale of development and investment.

“When you talk about this level of scale and when we look at parks that we comp it against, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and so how do you put a plan together to execute something like that over generations?” he said.

It also means establishing how to get started.

“That has been Grand Park’s kind of biggest pitfall for all these years, is we’ve owned this property for 20 years, and the community’s always like ‘When are you going to actually start?’” Cheney said. “And so I think that’s kind of the big first leap that we have to make, is figuring out a phase one that we can execute that works into the overall vision and get started.”

In October, the Frisco City Council approved an agreement with Design Workshop, Inc. for a site analysis and framework for Grand Park. The site analysis and framework deliverables are slated to include components like a project schedule and work plan, a site analysis, a market study and three framework studies. according to previous reporting by the Frisco Enterprise. 

Audrey Henvey is the news editor for Star Local Media. She writes for the Frisco Enterprise, Celina Record and Check Out Prosper. Email her with story suggestions at [email protected].