Boise’s oldest playground needs a facelift. What’s coming soon to Liberty Park

Boise is at last on track to renovate its oldest neighborhood park, 13 years after plans first took shape to remake the space on the Central Bench.

City planners filed preliminary documents Wednesday to update Liberty Park, which has been largely unchanged since the city last redeveloped the site four decades ago, according to Alicia Records, Boise’s parks resources superintendent.

“It’s the oldest, and it’s aging,” Records told the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission on April 16.

Liberty Park sits at the center of the neighborhood that shares its name. The nine-acre plot sits at the corner of North Liberty and West Denton streets, near Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center to the north and a tank farm to the south. Close to 1,100 residents — 433 households — live within a 10-minute walk of the park in what is one of Boise’s youngest, poorest and most diverse neighborhoods. In 2020, Liberty Park’s median household income was about 64% of the citywide figure — roughly $20,000 less per family, according to city data from the time.

Now, the neighborhood park is in line for a $1.43 million facelift. The money will replace the oldest playground in Boise’s inventory, swap a single portable toilet for a four-season restroom, build a new parking lot and bring the park up to standards set by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Records said.

“Proposed Liberty Park improvements will create a more inclusive and welcoming experience,” Boise Parks Planner Trevor Kesner wrote in his department’s application to the city.

The city’s goal is to provide an “achievable” plan that hits the major requests from neighbors, according to Jason Miller, a design and development manager with the city parks department.

The Boise City Council likely included enough funding from impact fees and its capital budget in fiscal 2026 to get that done, Miller told the commission.

“A permanent restroom is really high on everyone’s list,” Miller said.

City staffers have also applied for a federal grant, but haven’t heard back. The city was supposed to hear back a year ago, according to one commissioner, but delays at the federal level have stalled the grant.

The grant would “supercharge” the rebuild, funding a larger playground and expanded bathroom, Miller said.

Still, the vision falls short of what architects envisioned in a 2013 master plan for Liberty Park. That design called for a “total reconfiguration” of the park to put in four ball fields blooming outward from a central shelter. The plan would require enclosing an irrigation canal. It further called for turning the community garden on the canal’s south bank into ball fields. Those changes are “not achievable” with the current budget, Miller said.

But Miller also said that youth baseball isn’t calling for more fields like it was a decade-plus back.

“We’re not making any changes to the park’s use,” Commission Chair Linda Mazzu said in the meeting. Rather, the goal is “enhancing existing amenities” — and hauling away the porta-potty for good.

Miller told the commissioners that there was no firm construction timeline for renovating the park, but he hopes to see work begin in late summer or early fall.