BUTTE – Butte parks officials plan to lock up parking lots in the evenings at some of the headframe parks in Uptown.
“There tends to be a lot of underage drinking. We’ve had reports from neighbors that kids are burning out their tires and doing different things up here,” said Parks and Recreation Director JP Gallagher.
The plan is to install heavy gates at the Mount Con and Lexington Mine Yards which can be locked closed in the evenings. The gates cost about $5,500.
“We have the money available through the SARTA funding that gives Parks and Recreation some maintenance and operational funds and we’re going to use that fund to install the gates,” said Gallagher.
The parks department installed a gate last year to block traffic from going up to the loft on Big Butte due to liter complaints.
“We found more drug use and drug paraphernalia up there than we do here,” said Gallagher.
Parks and Recreations report that since they cut off access to the loft on Big Butte in the evenings by locking this big gate at night, they’ve ended some of the problems they’ve had up there, even though they have vandalism issued down here.
“We haven’t seen anywhere near the trash, we haven’t found any drug paraphernalia on that road that goes up to the Big Butte, we just don’t have the problems we’ve had in the past,” said Gallagher.
-John Emeigh reporting for MTN News
