If you’ve lived in Kingfisher for long, chances are you’ve run into John Gooden or Brian Walter.

Both have spent years – decades even – figuring out how to make Kingfisher a nicer place to live and then doing their best to change naysayers into yay-sayers to make almost inconceivably big projects a reality.

Dreaming up ways to add beauty and residential quality of life to a small city takes a special kind of artistic vision.

And that’s the easy part.

The real beast is finding ways to fund pie-in-the-sky projects and convincing others to join the bandwagon.

Sometimes it takes decades of effort – like Gooden and Walter’s determination to ring the city with recreational trails, a project Kingfisher Trails Inc. has literally pieced together through a patchwork of grants and private and public funding.

Most recently, two more parks passed the magic threshold from unfunded to funded, largely due to these two determined men and their unwillingness to take no for an answer.

Newfield Community Park, Gooden’s ambitious $1.7 million vision for a meandering festival grounds constructed in the city’s reclaimed floodplain just west of downtown, received notification last week that it qualifies for another $490,000 grant from the Land and Water Conservation fund, the last major funding piece needed to start construction.

And Walter announced this week that he and other Kingfisher Tree Board volunteers collected sufficient private donations to fund the approximately $45,000 North Entrance/Survivor Tree Park.

Constructed on the triangle-shaped tract of land south of Double D’s, the park will feature a low monument with a “Welcome to Kingfisher” sign which mimics the south entrance sign on U.S. 81.

The entrance park also will be landscaped with growing plants, the centerpiece of which will be a seedling from the Survivor Tree, the tree that withstood the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing and still stands today as a monument to that tragic event.

The tree holds a special significance to Kingfisher, because Kingfisher High School graduate Steve Williams was one of the people killed in the bombing.

“We appreciate everyone who so generously donated to bring this project to life,” Walter said.

Construction is expected to start sometime after April 1, with an estimated completion date of early August, Walter said.

Meanwhile, Gooden said the Newfield Community Park construction will have to be completed in about two and a half years to meet the terms of the funding grants.

Another project of Kingfisher Trails Inc., the park and festival grounds fundraising effort was kicked off by a $500,000 gift from the Newfield Foundation, in exchange for naming rights.

An initial Land and Water Conservation Grant added another $370,000 and other private gifts have totaled approximately $150, 000, Gooden said.

“There will be need to fill in some gaps with help from others, but we are full steam ahead,” Gooden said. “It’s an exciting time!”

Extensive preliminary work has already been done, including negotiating and purchasing properties to complete the park’s massive footprint, which started with flood-impacted properties purchased and razed by the city through a FEMA-funded grant program.

The city also voted to vacate portions of several streets and alleys through the park area, to allow that space to be incorporated into the planned uses, “We are approaching the midway point on the two-year grant and things are progressing well,” Gooden said.

“You will see that the second phase of the park has a lot of construction involved, including festival grounds, a nature-themed playground, five pavilions, a pump track, a wetland pond, a footbridge, restrooms, concessions, a gateway entrance, traffic circles, a fishing dock and even a dog park.

“Additionally, there will be space to power and set up food trucks and other temporary concessions.

“There will be opportunities for the public to be involved, including area clean-up, upgrades to the band shell sound and lighting and other things.

“We are looking forward to making the park a tremendous asset to the quality of life here.”