In spite of opposition from a small group of parents and neighborhood residents, a new park and playground will be built in Battery Park City after all.

A Community Board 1 committee voted Tuesday night to support the state Department of Transportation’s plan to rebuild West Thames Park, at West and West Thames Street, as part of its reconstruction of West Street (Route 9A). Next week, crews will begin the first phase of the park’s $9-million overhaul, which includes razing the existing cluster of rustic wooden play equipment and full-grown poplar and pear trees known locally as “Tire Swing Park.” The DOT has said it plans to reopen the park by next spring.

The committee’s vote brought an end to weeks of debate over the park’s design, protracted by parents and nearby residents who wanted Tire Swing Park to remain largely untouched.

“We’re just excited to have a plan that gets us to completion,” said Joe Brown, the state DOT’s director of construction on the Route 9A project. “It was always our goal to let the community decide. Now we have our marching orders, and it puts us in a position where we can finish by Memorial Day.”

Community groups and local officials began negotiating with the DOT over the new park and playground’s design in 2005. That design called for new play equipment, separate playgrounds for older and younger children, a water play area and a new, level 11,500-square-foot lawn between West Thames and Albany Streets. It was finalized in March, and construction was to begin on Oct. 13.

But as the department was making its final preparations last month to start work on the new park, a group of residents rose up to protest the plan. In the eleventh hour, they asked the state to rethink its design and, if possible, preserve the existing playground and trees. The state acquiesced and produced an alternate design that left the wooden playground in place—the trees, designers determined, would have to be removed no matter what—and incorporated the larger lawn and children’s basketball court of the first plan.

On Oct. 6, CB1’s Battery Park City Committee weighed that plan against the one it had approved in March, ultimately concluding that the earlier design was the right choice.

“Tire Swing Park was a wonderful park, but I think it’s time has come and gone,” committee co-chairman Jeff Galloway said. “Overall, I think the [the state’s first design] is an improvement.”

Apart from the two designs’ aesthetic and functional differences, most of the committee members said preserving the current playground wasn’t worth the potential loss of the other parts of the new park, including new community gardens, the leveled lawn and the dog run at the south end of the park. Because the city’s Public Design Commission approved the new park as a single entity earlier this year, changing any part of its design would have required repeating the approval process, and almost certainly set construction back at least a year. That delay could have jeopardized the roughly $9 million of federal grant money funding the project, which is only guaranteed through the end of the current fiscal year.

“Even if you do like [the alternate option] better, it’s not so much better that you jeopardize the lawn, the basketball courts, the community gardens and the dog run,” said Galloway, a long-time advocate for the dog run.

“We have an opportunity here to build a new park for future generations,” committee member Anthony Notaro added. “I think that’s the right, responsible thing to do.

Upset with the direction the committee seemed to be taking prior to its vote, protest organizer and Battery Park City resident Matthew Fenton made one last appeal on the current playground’s behalf. He said despite the DOT’s effort to redesign the park to his group’s liking, he still did not understand why the old playground had to be replaced. Fenton also said that while it was uncertain if the funding would be available to build the alternate design a year from now, he was even less certain the DOT would finish the new park on time.

“We love the playground as it is; it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it,” Fenton said. “We don’t believe that the [new] playground they promise will be delivered, and we especially don’t believe that it will be delivered when they say it will be. This community is being asked to take a huge gamble.”

Though the protesters were unsuccessful in preserving their beloved park, Galloway reminded them that their efforts—as well as those of the committee members and park designers—were not wasted. During the negotiations, the DOT had agreed to install a true tire swing, rather than a modern version of one. The department also upped the number of trees it would plant in the playground area, and increased the usable lawn space to the south of the toddler play area.

“The [new park design] is a lot better today than it was before [they] spoke,” Galloway said.