La Follette Park Got New Pickleball Courts Last Summer. Kaukauna Is Already Redesigning It Again.

Kaukauna's council approved a new playground and basketball court at La Follette Park in 2024. The pickleball courts that came with it opened the following summer. By fall 2026, the city is soliciting design proposals for the same park again, this time for the restrooms, the basketball court surface, and the parking lot. La Follette has not sat still for three straight budget cycles.

Across town the pattern repeats. Strassburg Park got council approval in June 2025 and opened a brand-new playground and basketball court to the public that September, with visitors asked to enter from Green Bay Road rather than trample the newly seeded grass along Florence Street. The park's open-air shelter, gaga ball pit, and baseball backstop were still pending completion as the city's 2026 budget went to print. Nothing in Kaukauna's park system finishes in one clean pass. The city circles back to the same locations year after year, adding a piece each time the budget allows it.

Strassburg's Playground Opened With a Catch

Strassburg Park sits along Highway 96 just past the entrance to Grignon Park on Kaukauna's northeast side. When the new playground equipment went in during the fall of 2025, the city asked residents to route foot traffic through the Green Bay Road entrance while the turf around the new equipment took hold. That's a small operational detail, but it tells you the timeline: the playground was council-approved in June and open to the public by September, a fast turnaround for a municipal project.

The rest of Strassburg's plan moved on a slower clock. The city's 2026 budget documents describe the open-air shelter, gaga ball pit, and baseball backstop as work still anticipated for early spring, meaning the playground you can use today was only the first piece of what the city planned for that corner of the park.

Strassburg's location matters here too. Because it sits right next to Grignon Park's entrance, the northeast side of Kaukauna has effectively been running two separate park projects at once: a finished playground on one side and a still-developing set of features on the other, worked on in part by Kaukauna High School's Civic Engagement Class.

La Follette Has Been in the Rotation Since 2023

No park in the city illustrates the leapfrog pattern better than La Follette. The timeline runs like this:

1. 2023. The city hints at a major upgrade in a social media post, with renderings from Lee Recreation showing slides, swings, and climbing towers on rubberized surfacing.
2. 2024. Construction begins in May. The new all-inclusive playground opens after Memorial Day, with equipment sectioned by age range and features like a universal swing and lower transfer platforms built for accessibility.
3. 2025. New pickleball courts open that summer, a year after the playground equipment finished installing.
4. 2026. In May, the city holds an informational meeting where residents review concept designs and vote on preferred amenities for a new pavilion and site plan. By fall, the city is seeking proposals to redesign the park again, this round covering restroom upgrades and resurfacing of the basketball court and parking lot.

That's four separate rounds of investment in the same park across four budget years. If you only checked in on La Follette once, in any one of those years, you'd have reasonably assumed the project was either finished or stalled. It was neither. It was mid-rotation, which is a different thing than either of those.

Where the Requests Actually Come From

None of this is arbitrary. Kaukauna's Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan for 2025 through 2030 surveyed residents on what they wanted from the city's 37 parks and open spaces, which together cover 458 acres. Trails topped the list by a wide margin, mentioned 254 times in resident feedback. Winter activities like ice rinks and snowshoeing came in at 68 mentions, water activities at 67, and sport courts at 57. Pickleball specifically was called out nine times, and clean, available bathrooms came up five times.

Line those numbers up against what's actually getting built and the sequencing makes sense. The ice rink and gaga ball pit planned for Grignon Park respond directly to the winter-activities and play-equipment categories. The pickleball courts at La Follette answer a specific, repeated ask. The restroom upgrades now on the table for La Follette's next round address the exact complaint residents flagged in the survey. Even the quieter work, like the ongoing extension of the Kakalin Trail behind the Kaukauna Public Library, tracks back to the single most-requested category in the whole plan. Trails don't get ribbon-cuttings the way playgrounds do, but they're what the survey said people wanted most.

Two Park Names That Predate the Renovations

Strassburg Park's name goes back to the German-French Alsace region that many of its original settlers came from. White City Park, on the other side of town, takes its name from housing built by Monroe Wertheimer for employees of Thilmany, one of the paper mills that shaped Kaukauna's early economy. The gaga pits and pickleball lines going in now are recent additions to parks whose names have been fixed in place for generations, a reminder that the current wave of upgrades is layered on top of a much older settlement pattern rather than replacing it.

The Park Near You Isn't Done. It's Just Not Its Turn Yet.

Kaukauna's 2026 capital improvement budget set aside roughly $2.19 million specifically for park work, spread across a system of 37 locations. That's not enough to touch every park in a single year, so the city works down its own list, informed by the recreation survey, one location at a time, and comes back for a second or third pass once the next round of funding opens up. The budget also flags a multi-use stage or pavilion under evaluation for either Central or Hydro Park, though that one is still in the discussion stage rather than committed.

If your own neighborhood park looks unfinished, that's probably accurate. It's also probably temporary, and it's worth checking what round it's actually in before assuming it got skipped.

If you're comparing homes near one of these parks, walking the actual site before the paperwork starts tells you more than a listing photo ever will. Kelly Davies Homes can talk through what's finished, what's mid-rotation, and what's likely up next on the city's list before you make an offer.