Pickleball will soon be available to Richmond Heights visitors as a final deal has been made with Site Tech Inc. to resurface the city’s aging tennis facilities located at 27285 Highland Road and create six pickleball courts and two tennis courts. According to Cameron Campbell, the parks and recre ation director for the city, they wanted to update the area as pickleball has become popular and the area was already in need of renovations. “We’re out of date,” Campbell said after a Feb. 24 council meeting. “We have four tennis courts that aren’t really used and in really, really bad shape. There are cracks everywhere, very dangerous. Coming from a safety background, I viewed it as very hazardous. “A lot of people were using it as a dog park, leaving poop, not doing anything to pick it up so we had to lock it up.” He said Site Tech will be using tar and geotextile fabric to fix the playing area, then they will apply another layer of an acrylic “system” to provide the base layer for painted court layouts. Because they are not replacing the infrastructure underneath, the renovations coming in at $164,078 will serve as a temporary fix and are expected to last around five to seven years. Campbell said they are taking on the project to provide something for people to use as they figured out what a future, more permanent recreation area will look like and how to fund it. “I brought it to the mayor to do a complete project, which costs a lot of money out of pocket, and she told me to find an alternative,” Campbell said. “I call it kind of a band-aid… I would rather put a band-aid on it and give people a pickleball experience and still keep some tennis courts so we can at least have programming rather than wait until whenever we have the finances to do so. “I’m pretty excited for it, too, just because we’re kind of out of date. I think we are the only Hillcrest city without pickleball courts.” He said because the weather has been hard to gauge, they are hoping to have the area completed by mid-June. ...read more read less