Times Observer file Photo Warren City Council has settled on the scope of an improvement project at Crescent Park.

Warren City Council earlier this month pumped the brakes on a project that would install infrastructure at Crescent Park.

An additional component that was set to come along with those infrastructure repairs? A healing garden.

The Street Landscape Committee has been a staunch advocate of the healing garden project and discussed the tenuous status of the project on Tuesday.

“The project has certainly had its setbacks,” Department of Public Works Director Mike Holtz said.

When the project initially went out for bids, those bids came in approximately $200,000 over budget.

Council needed funds to cover the debt service for the purchase of new fire trucks and found it in pushing that project and another infrastructure project on Fifth Ave. down the road.

“Myself and (City Manager) Nancy (Freenock) and people from the state and the architect are working on repackaging it with a little less of the amenities,” Holtz told the committee. “I’ll be honest, I don’t know.”

“I think it’s a great project,” Freenock said. “(I) don’t know if we can locate another funding source…. We need to find some other avenue of support. I don’t want to let it go.”

“I’m convinced this path would get a lot of use,” Holtz said while Freenock noted that the city “will keep banging our head against the wall until we find a window.”

Discussion focused on what the cost would be of just the healing garden or various fundraising options and whether the city would complete some of the infrastructure work in house.

Holtz said the city needs to “make a realistic project” that “someone might contribute to. Not a wish project.”

“We have a plan from an architect,” Committee Chair Josie Gerardi said. “There’s nothing wrong with being creative as far as our own self” and developing “our own unique place and not a copy” of a garden somewhere else.

The project will likely be back to the committee for discussion at the next meeting which will be in January.