Amanda Goble, President of the Amboy Territorial Days Association, said that she doesn’t know if space would be left for a feasible horse arena at the Amboy Territorial Park once property lines are addressed with the park’s neighbor, the North Clark Historical Museum.
One Amboy resident, Lacey Catania, is trying to garner community support to make the horse arena usable again at Amboy Territorial Park. However, the park is also in the works for a Boundary Line Adjustment (BLA) with the neighboring museum. Due to an addition on the backside of the museum’s building, the south fence for the horse arena goes right through the property line.
“So we’re in the process of doing a BLA with the museum to adjust that out to where their building is, so they have enough property for their building and so on, because there’s also a drainage in the southeast corner of the arena,” Goble said. “That is a problem that we didn’t know about until 2021 as well, and there is also, we have an easement that we’ve given them on the east side of the arena for their building that they have out there that I believe has a steam donkey and other things in it.”
Goble said the process is essentially to even up the property lines before moving forward with anything else related to the horse arena.
“So then there are no issues in the future for the museum, there are no issues in the future for us,” she said. “And so everything is on the up and up with the county.”
Goble pointed out that the size of the horse arena on the park’s property is already small as is, and readjusting property lines would force it to be even smaller. Goble said that the major talking point from the park’s board perspective has been the property line adjustment still needing to be done, and the fact that it will shrink the space allotted for a revival of the horse arena.
“That’s what we’ve been telling them the entire time,” Goble said.
At the January meeting of the Amboy Territorial Days Association, the park board of directors reported that the park had identified a property line discrepancy with the museum, as noted in the meeting minutes. According to the minutes, when a BLA is completed and the arena's size changes, it will be considered new and not grandfathered in. As it is labeled a new arena, there will likely be legal setbacks, with most being a minimum of 50 feet, the minutes state.
For over five years, since 2019 when the saddle weekend committee announced that they would no longer operate at the Amboy horse arena, nobody has reached to the Territorial Days Association about operating at the horse arena, Goble said. When Catania presented her idea and goal to reopen the space, the park essentially has bigger fish to fry in a slow churning process.
Once the BLA is settled, Goble said, if feasible, the association directors would move forward with a plan for the space, which could include Catania’s vision.
“We’ll move forward with it,” Goble said. “But before that, we can’t really do anything because then at that point, if you open up something and then you turn around, it’s like what kind of people are we if we say, ‘OK, you can come do this, this and this, and put all this money into it, and then we go, ‘Oh no, we’ve done this. Now we’ve given half of it away.’ That’s not right for anybody.”
Goble concluded that up to this point, since the property dispute was discovered in 2021, the future of the horse arena stands with the BLA.
