Sep. 14—TRAVERSE CITY — Splashing good times at Clinch Park's William G. Milliken Waterscape could get even better if city commissioners approve a new feature and other upgrades.

The summertime staple could get a new, interactive feature called a cascade river, according to plans city Parks and Recreation Supervisor Michelle Hunt showed commissioners at their recent study session.

Renderings show a brightly colored trio of chutes fed by water falling from a funnel-shaped opening atop a vertical tube. Inside the chutes would be various gizmos for making splashes. Vortex International, the company proposing to install the feature and other upgrades, billed it in submissions to the city as a feature that lets many kids play at once.

The new cascade river would be part of a $125,057 upgrade to the splash pad, including two new activator buttons on bollards to turn on each half of the splash pad for four-minute stretches, documents show. That total includes a 15-percent contingency.

Hunt said that would save enough water that the city should be able to skip a new 2,000-gallon holding tank — avoiding an extra $45,640 to buy and install, documents show. It's an improvement over the current setup that requires a manual shut-down in bad weather or if nobody's there.

"If there are no kids playing in it, the water is continuously running," she said. "That means we have to continuously add more chemicals because it's a closed system."

Commissioner Ashlea Walter said she and her kids enjoyed the button feature on other nearby splash pads.

Other behind-the-scenes improvements would add more automation to a splash pad system that requires too much hands-on work, Hunt said. She found out from other communities with splash pads that they don't spend much staff time on their own largely self-contained setups.

A new controller would shut off the splash pad if it detects rain or a temperature drop below 65 degrees, Hunt said. It would also add wireless internet connectivity allowing park staff to turn the water on or off remotely.

Another controller would add chemicals to the water automatically, helping to ensure that's happening at the correct rate without needing, Hunt said.

"This will allow us to control and monitor all that at a much more accurate scale than we're doing right now," she said.

The upgrade would also add a rain diverter and debris trap, rain and wind sensors and chemical tanks, documents show. The city opted against Vortex International's recommendation to replace grass around the splash pad with artificial turf for an extra $90,965.

Commissioners could decide Monday whether to approve the upgrades, to be paid for with money from a settlement stemming from an incident from the splash pad's early years, city Manager Marty Colburn said.

Cost concerns prompted a previous city manager and other city staff to sign off on a contractor's recommended changes to the splash pad when it was installed in 2013, as previously reported. As a result, an arch didn't function properly, the filtration system was inadequate and an overflow drain was directly linked to a sewage line, among other issues.

That connection led to sewage backing up into the splash pad's reservoir in June 2014, days after city staff started it for its first season. Grand Traverse County Health Department received 16 complaints of children with gastrointestinal illnesses and other symptoms consistent with sewage exposure but, according to health officials, not definitively linked to the backup.

The city removed the link and paid for other modifications to the splash pad in the intervening years, and pursued a lengthy legal process that resulted in the contractor that oversaw the splash pad construction and other work in Clinch Park paying a settlement in 2016.

As a result, the city has $300,000 for future improvements to the splash pad, documents show, and Mayor Richard Lewis said that money is set aside specifically for that purpose.

"I think it's a good step forward and it's kind of what we set the money aside for," he said, adding there will be some left for future projects.

If approved, plans call for installing the upgrades between the splash pad's late-May-through-Labor Day seasons in 2022 and 2023, documents show.

Hunt agreed to find out for commissioners how long the upgraded equipment would be expected to last after Walter raised the question.

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