And it is. But it’s much more, city officials said.
The centerpiece of the 10-acre site is a new stormwater pond and a filter marsh to clean runoff before it flows into Lake Minneola. The “innovative” passive park built around it includes recreational elements such as trails linking to downtown businesses and a performance area that will serve as the site of festivals and athletic competitions including Clermont’s signature triathlons.
On Friday, Lake County’s largest city will host a grand opening of the $9.5 million project.
City Manager Darren Gray calls Victory Pointe, which runs from Lake Minneola to south of Minneola Avenue, a “game-changer” for downtown.
“When we were designing it, we didn’t want it to just look like a stormwater park,” Gray said. “We wanted it to be an asset to the community.”
He paid a visit to the site Wednesday and was blown away at how it’s turned out.
“I was like ‘wow’ … it’s exactly what we envisioned.”
Victory Pointe — which also includes a pavilion and bathrooms — is seen as equally important to the future of downtown as it is for its recreational and environmental attributes, officials said. They’re all intertwined, officials said.
“Before any development or redevelopment can happen in our downtown, we needed to have a place to put our stormwater,” Gray said.
Businesses currently must have a retention area to collect stormwater runoff, Ash said.
Victory Pointe now will take care of that chore.
“The system is designed to filter out pollutants going into the lake,” she said. With Lake Minneola considered an “impaired” water body by the state, improving the water quality is deemed crucial.
“The side benefit is that then frees up land for construction or expansion of businesses in the downtown area because they won’t need their retention ponds,” Ash said. “I have a list of over 40 businesses that are coming into the city. A lot of them are downtown.”
Existing merchants are thrilled, she said, by the prospect of South Lake Trail bicyclists, runners and walkers taking a quick detour into downtown for a pit stop — and to spend cash.
Officials are thrilled the first major project included in the downtown-waterfront master plan approved in 2015 is coming to fruition. In 2016, the Florida Redevelopment Association recognized Clermont and GAI’s Community Solutions Group in Orlando for outstanding redevelopment achievements for the master plan.
The celebrating will start at 10 a.m. with a ceremony followed by a Cypress Gardens water-ski show at 10:45 a.m.
“We expect hundreds of people to be there for the ribbon-cutting, especially since we’re having the Cypress Gardens water skiers,” Ash said. “That’s going to be a real event topper, if you will.”
An earlier version of this story misstated the height of the tower.
jfallstrom@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5916