Scramble Alley's Next Chapter Runs Through a 2024 Survey, a Grant Match, and a Parks Master Plan

"We were princesses and castles, we were superheroes, saving the city," Ryn King said of the wooden playground behind Soddy-Daisy's city hall, trying to explain why a swing set and a splinter-prone climbing structure matter enough to organize over.

King is secretary of Project Scramble Alley 2.0, one arm of a grassroots push that gathered more than 600 signatures this summer to stop the city from tearing down Scramble Alley. The playground has stood behind the Municipal Building on Dayton Pike since volunteers built it by hand sometime in the mid-1990s, and on September 8 the Board of Commissioners voted to remove it for good. If you've followed the Facebook threads, you already know the broad strokes: a beloved 30-year-old structure, a safety inspection that filled pages with photos of rotting wood, a city that says it tried and a community that says it wasn't tried hard enough.

Timing adds useful context here. The city asked residents about Scramble Alley's future in 2024, and the answers that came back leaned toward removal, so the September 8 vote followed a direction the survey had already pointed to.

The survey that already answered the question

Buried in the reporting from this summer is a detail that reframes everything: the city sent a survey to residents in 2024 asking whether Scramble Alley should be repaired or redesigned, and the results surprised the people who sent it. Most respondents said it was time to tear it down. That was two years before Scramble Alley closed its gates, two years before the Facebook group formed, and two years before anyone had heard of Project Scramble Alley 2.0.

The petition drive that picked up 600 signatures this summer came after the city already had those survey results in hand. The city's own messaging around that survey period put a number on the repair option: restoring the playground to its original wooden condition would run somewhere between $150,000 and $175,000, with community fundraising needed to cover it. That is also the smallest figure anyone has floated all year.

The estimate kept climbing every time someone official said it out loud

By June 2026, when the closure was formally announced, city figures were already telling a different story. WDEF reported that adding new play structures at Veterans Park instead would cost around $120,000, while building an entirely new playground at Scramble Alley itself was estimated at $350,000 or more. That same month, city staff gave commissioners a wider range: repairing the existing structure would run $200,000 to $300,000, and a full wooden rebuild, the kind that would actually replace what Scramble Alley currently is, would cost $700,000 to $800,000. City Manager Burt Johnson used the same $750,000 to $800,000 figure for a new wooden playground.

The September 8 vote settled demolition, not design. That question got picked back up at a follow-up commission meeting later in the month, where Johnson told commissioners he'd gotten ballpark quotes from Game Time, a playground equipment manufacturer, for a smaller, simpler structure: $300,000 to $500,000. That's not a rebuild of Scramble Alley's wooden maze. It's a different kind of playground entirely, and Vice Mayor Mark Penney said as much at that meeting, asking that whatever goes in be designed to feel specific to Soddy-Daisy rather than something generic pulled from a catalog.

Line up those numbers in order and you get somewhere useful. The original repair estimate that circulated when the petition started was $150,000 to $175,000. The full wooden rebuild commissioners priced out in June was $700,000 to $800,000. What the city is actually pursuing now, per that later September meeting, sits in between at $300,000 to $500,000, for something that won't look like the playground anyone is fighting to save. The number that started the fight and the number the city is working from now aren't the same conversation.

Why the money kept slipping through the city's fingers

None of this happened because Soddy-Daisy wasn't trying to fund it. The city applied twice for a BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Playground Grant, a private grant aimed at exactly this kind of project, and got turned down both times. That's the funding path residents online seem to assume is still available. It isn't, at least not through that door.

The path Johnson raised at that later September meeting instead is a state Local Parks and Recreation Fund grant, which works as a 50/50 match. If the city gets it, Soddy-Daisy would need to put up roughly $150,000 of its own, which happens to land close to that original repair estimate everyone's been quoting. The catch is that a city has to have a current parks master plan on file to even apply, and Soddy-Daisy doesn't have one yet, even though the city told residents back in June it was already working with a consultant on exactly that plan. Three months later, commissioners were still describing the master plan as something that has to get written before the grant application can go anywhere.

Holly Park offers a useful comparison, because Soddy-Daisy has already secured county matching funds once for a different park. Holly Park, the city's fishing and boating spot on Soddy Creek, received a $250,000 match from Hamilton County's small-town park grant program back in 2025, the same round that funded projects in Lookout Mountain, Signal Mountain, Red Bank, Lakesite, and Walden. The city's newly adopted FY2026-27 budget folds a playground replacement into the same $500,000 parks line item that's paying for Holly Park's dock and landscaping work, with the county reimbursing half. City Manager Johnson has already cautioned commissioners that the full list of planned projects, playground replacement included, might not all fit inside that total.

Put plainly: the money mechanism that worked for Holly Park is the same one Scramble Alley is now riding alongside, and it's already spoken for in part. The state grant that could add real dollars on top of that is sitting behind a master plan the city hasn't finished writing.

What this actually means if you're in Soddy-Daisy right now

Scramble Alley is coming down, following the September 8 vote and a 2024 survey that leaned toward removal. What's still open is what replaces it, when, and whether it stretches the shared parks budget thin enough that something else, dock work at Holly Park or landscaping or parking, gets scaled back to make room.

In the meantime, the playground isn't the only option in town. Veterans Park has its own playground alongside a walking track and two lighted ball fields, and Commissioner Everett pointed out at that later September meeting that school playgrounds around the city remain open to the public too. Neither replicates what Scramble Alley was built to be, a wooden maze kids could get genuinely lost in, but they're there now while the next chapter gets written.

If you want to weigh in before the design gets locked, the commission meetings where all of this keeps surfacing are open to the public, and the city has posted updates directly through its own site and Facebook page rather than through any single news outlet. That's still the most reliable way to catch the actual vote before it happens, rather than the retelling of it afterward.

Soddy-Daisy keeps changing in small, specific ways like this, one commission meeting at a time. If you want to stay ahead of what's actually happening here rather than the secondhand version, the Dustin Mullins Team tracks these local shifts as part of covering the Soddy-Daisy area closely, and we're glad to point you toward whatever's next on the city's agenda if you're following along.