Fishers mayor hopeful for busier year at Geist Waterfront Park

In its first year, Fishers’ $16 million Geist Waterfront Park saw thousands fewer visitors than the anticipated 150,000.

According to numbers provided by the city, a total of 7,254 entries—number of vehicles, not number of people—passed through the gate at the 70-acre Geist Waterfront Park last year from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

The city is making it cheaper and easier to use the beach in its second season: Fishers has slashed the $50 per-vehicle entry fee it charges non-residents and has cut ties with an app it required Fishers residents to download in order to gain entrance.

During the week, the park will be free for nonresidents. They’ll have to pay a $25 per-vehicle fee on weekends and holidays, but they’ll be able to pay at the gate rather than only online and in advance like last year.

The $50 parking fee for non-residents drew deep criticism. Fishers officials at the time said the fee was necessary to control the number of outside visitors using the park.

“After the first year, we feel confident that we can ease some of those restrictions to allow for more people to utilize the park more often in different ways,” Mayor Scott Fadness told IBJ.

Also, Fishers residents will only need to show their driver’s license at the gate. Last year, they had to download an app to access a digital pass. Fadness said while 15,000 people downloaded the app, the city received feedback that the technology was a barrier for some residents.

Geist Waterfront Park, in a cove at 10811 Olio Road on Fishers’ east side, is the only shoreline of the 1,900-acre reservoir that’s accessible to the public. The rest is dominated by upscale developments.

Fadness began the process of developing the park in 2017 when he announced plans to purchase and redevelop Irving Materials Inc.’s 70-acre aggregate mine at the southeast corner of the Olio Road Bridge.

The park opened in April 2023 as the newest of Fishers’ 23 parks. It features 800 feet of shoreline and a 100-yard beach along a small cove with a channel that connects it to Geist Reservoir. The park also has a partial trail network that is expected to be completed in future construction phases.

“If it wasn’t for this park, it would be 90 homes, and the average Fishers resident who doesn’t live directly on the water would have no access to the water whatsoever,” Fadness said.

Geist Waterfront Park was designed by Indianapolis-based Browning Day and was planned to be built in three stages, with completion by 2040.

The city bought the land for $15.7 million after an eminent domain proceeding. The Fishers City Council financed the park’s first phase, called The Landing, by issuing $16 million in bonds.

In the park’s master plan, Creekside, the second phase, would include a boardwalk stretching over wetlands, a waterfront nature pavilion with a fireplace, trails, a nature-themed playscape, an outdoor adventure course and additional restrooms.

The Uplands, the final phase, would include the restoration of native woodland and prairie ecosystems, an overlook plaza, a non-motorized boat launch, paved and soft-surface nature trails, a wildflower garden, picnic shelters, and screening from nearby neighborhoods.

Plans for the second and third phase aren’t imminent. Fadness has said from the beginning it will be up to future city leaders to continue the park’s development.

“The most important thing for us was to secure the property [and] create an amenity that people can utilize today,” he said. “And then for future Fishers residents and leaders, they can look to further develop a park when they see fit.”

‘Hardly any people there’

Geist Waterfront Park is one of two public beaches still open in Hamilton County. Morse Beach along Morse Reservoir in Noblesville is open for $6 per person from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Saxony Beach, a 300-foot beach on a 20-acre man-made lake in Fishers just north of East 131st Street in the Saxony development, closed last year; visitors were encouraged to go to Geist Waterfront Park.

But the park elicited mixed reactions during its first year.

Paul Cantrell of Fishers occasionally visits the park with his two children, ages 9 and 10. He said his kids would have enjoyed the park more if there had been more people around.

“The park and the amenities, they were good,” Cantrell said. “The main reason why they didn’t like it was, there just were hardly any people there. The kids want to go to a park where there’s other kids they can play with. They prefer to go to Brooks School Park, which on a nice day is packed with people.”

John Sorg, also a Fishers resident, said he visited Geist Waterfront Park last summer with his 9-year-old granddaughter, who was less than enthusiastic about getting in the water.

“We walked on the beach, and she said, ‘Pop-Pop, I’m not getting in that water. It’s dirty,’” he said.

Sorg added that charging nonresidents $50 to park was “absurd” and that he can go to any other park and not have to prove he lives in the city of Fishers.

He said other parks in the city have better play options for children, such as basketball courts and jungle gyms.

“I know they’ve got trails and that sort of thing, but for kids, if you want to make it a family thing, I don’t think it’s all that hard. I think they overthought it, and they overspent for what they have,” he said. “I just think it was a swing and a miss is the best way to put it.”

Fishers Director of Recreation and Wellness Jake Reardon-McSoley partially attributed the lower-than-expected traffic last year to environmental concerns and the weather.

He said the park was closed 16 of the 100 days of beach season due to dangerous air conditions from Canadian wildfire smoke. And he said the temperature was below 80 degrees for 20 days the park was open.

The park also closed for three days in late August after high levels of E. coli were found in the water. The city performs weekly water testing and algae removal at Geist Waterfront Park, and six industrial aerators filter materials entering the cove from the reservoir.

“I think we can be a really nice information source for the community for the whole reservoir because it’s the same water throughout Geist, and there’s not very many places around the reservoir that do any testing at all,” Reardon-McSoley said.

‘Just take some time’

Fadness isn’t concerned about last year’s visitor count. He predicted that the park is “going to stand the test of time.”

“I’m confident we’re going to have lots and lots of people use that park,” he said. “It’ll just take some time.”

Fadness pointed to two of the city’s newer parks—Flat Fork Creek Park and Fishers AgriPark—as examples of parks that took a while to catch on.

Flat Fork Creek Park opened in 2015 on 60 acres near East 101st Street and Cyntheanne Road with a 50-foot sledding hill, nature trails, a 2-mile mountain bike course, a fishing pond and three tree houses.

The 33-acre Fishers AgriPark opened in 2020 at the southeast corner of East 113th Street and Florida Road. It features fields, gardens, greenhouses and a 5-acre livestock area with a horse, cattle, sheep, chickens, goats and a pig named Otis.

“Everyone knows how to utilize a baseball field or a football field,” Fadness said. “But some of the parks that we’ve built, like the Agripark and Flat Fork and Geist Waterfront, it just takes a little time for residents to figure out how to access it and how to use it and [to decide] whether it’s indeed for them or not.”

Andrew Neal, a real estate broker who lives with his wife and four children in Carmel, said his family visits Geist Waterfront Park about once a month. His two youngest daughters enjoy the pirate ship and beach. The family eats at the picnic tables.

Neal said his family also travels to beaches in Florida and Michigan, and he appreciates having a beach nearby.

“I think it is an improvement that they are reducing the entry cost during the summer months. I’d say reducing the entry cost to maybe $10 would be more realistic,” he said. “I understand they want to save it for Fishers residents, but I think by reducing it, they’re going in the right direction.”

City Councilor Pete Peterson, who represents residents who live near Geist Waterfront Park, said the city made the right move in decreasing the nonresident parking fee after the park did not receive the expected traffic.

“[You take] a look at the data and say, ‘Is what happened what we thought was going to happen?’” Peterson said. “If it didn’t, then we need to regroup and kind of move forward, which is exactly what happened here.”•