MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP - At a special meeting on Tuesday, September 23rd, the Meridian Township Parks Commission discussed several projects they have planned for the coming year.

The department has thirteen budgeted projects for 2015, and much of that will go towards repairing several of the parks' facilities. Meridian Township Parks and Recreation Director LuAnn Maisner said that, without the millage that was passed in August, these areas would have been left to deteriorate further.

"I know that sounds like a story of gloom and doom, and I don't mean to sound that way, but, boy, many of our facilities are (deteriorating), and we've just been able to, kind of, patch them to make them work and to get by," Maisner said. "But there really was going to come a day, very soon, that we would be closing areas of our parks down."

Thanks to the new millage, the Meridian Township Parks and Recreation Department now has about $900,000 for projects, which Maisner said is up significantly from their budgets the past few years.