As the city of Raleigh celebrated the start of construction on its first new tennis courts in 30 years at Biltmore Hills Park, many residents pushed for more to be done.<\/p>\n
The groundbreaking event on Thursday highlighted eight new tennis courts that will be added to the tennis complex, along with improved accessibility to all courts and amenities and improvements to the park’s large ballfield<\/p>\n
In about a year, when construction is complete, Biltmore Hills will have 16 active tennis courts. However, longtime players like Nicole Sullivan argue that\u2019s only partially true.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lower eight courts are not in good shape,” Sullivan said. “They haven\u2019t been in good shape. They\u2019ve tried to resurface them, tried to fix them, and they\u2019re just not in good shape, and unfortunately, there\u2019s never been a commitment to fix those courts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sullivan and others showed up to the project groundbreaking with signs demanding accountability from city officials.<\/p>\n
Stephen Bentley, director of the city’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department, admitted that the tennis community has been advocating for improvements for nearly 10 years.<\/p>\n
WRAL News asked if and how the city plans to address their concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working with our consultants and the community on what it’s going to take to replace these courts,”\u00a0Bentley said. “How much does it cost?\u201d<\/p>\n
Bentley said those discussions will start in the fall with a goal to develop a budget by next spring. <\/p>\n
Sullivan and others say it shouldn\u2019t take that long.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have the money to do it,” Sullivan said. “This is bond money that\u2019s being spent. They have remaining money in the budget, and we just want to see those funds used here. Ideally, when we open this park again, we want all that work to be done at one time.\u201d <\/p>\n
The city of Raleigh told WRAL News that\u2019s simply not feasible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a perfect world, doing all of them at the same time would be great,” Bentley said. “But we don\u2019t live in a perfect world, and, unfortunately, the amount of money the city council and voters approved in the bond was for eight new courts.\u201d <\/p>\n
According to the city, its goal is to eventually host tennis tournaments at Biltmore Hills. Everyone WRAL News spoke with agreed it\u2019s a no-brainer with 16 new courts, it’s just a matter of how long that will take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the city of Raleigh celebrated the start of construction on its first new tennis courts in 30…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[255833,99,428],"class_list":["post-815862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-city-of-raleigh","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}