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1911–2028 · THE PLAN SEQUENCE PARKS.HTML NEVER CARRIED
The Kessler test, run against the county record and answered at the boundary where it belongs: George E. Kessler, the City Beautiful planner of Kansas City and Indianapolis (Indianapolis Park and Boulevard Plan adopted 1909; he led that city's Park Commission until 1915 and died in March 1923), did work in this county — but for the city, not the county, and in a city park the Granger ground never touches. The City of South Bend's Historic Preservation Commission staff reports state it precisely: "The 1911-1915 Parks and Boulevard system and the Leeper Park Plan, designed by celebrated planner and landscape architect George Kessler," embodied City Beautiful ideals, "connecting parks and boulevards as planned elements of a coordinated city plan"; his Leeper Park master plan issued in 1915, sorted the park into West for active recreation, Central for passive recreation, and East for the water works, guided development for the next decade, and was only partly installed, with WPA-funded extensions in the 1920s and 1930s. Tested against the county system, the answer is negative at full strength: no Kessler plan, commission, or attribution appears anywhere in the St. Joseph County Parks record — not in the master plans, not in the board minutes, not in any county park's history — because there was no county system for him to plan: the county board dates to 1966, forty-three years after his death. The Kessler name in this county is a City of South Bend fact, dated 1911–1915, and it stops at the city line. No equivalent named planner stands at the head of the county sequence either; the county plans below are staff-and-consultant documents, and no "county Kessler" exists in the record.
The master-plan sequence, in order: Indiana law puts county park boards on a five-year master-plan cycle filed with the Department of Natural Resources, and the county's sequence in the open record runs: the 2014–2018 Master Plan (its Section A Introduction and Section B Park Agency Profile, with the agency history and park law chapters, filed in the county DocumentCenter); the 2019–2023 Master Plan, produced by the Troyer Group — the board's June 2023 minutes record Slauson and Witkowski meeting Troyer Group on 24 May 2023 "to discuss progress on the Parks' current Master Plan, which Troyer produced for us in 2018"; and the current 2024–2028 Master Plan, prepared by Rundell Ernstberger Associates (REA), whose process the minutes track month by month — focus groups and advisory committee through June 2023, public feedback at the Running Wild event on 19 August 2023, draft due to IDNR by 15 November 2023 with the final due 15 April 2024, first draft in IDNR's hands by December 2023, revision on IDNR comments through the winter, and final approval expected at the April or May 2024 board meeting. The plan's own Chapter 4, Future Plan, frames recommendations for the next five years with actions over the next 5–10 years. The current plan's horizon year is 2028, and the board was still reporting action-item updates against the 2024–2028 plan in its March 2026 minutes — the plan is live, mid-course, and the Anderson Trail County Park build inside the Granger townships is one of its action items. Plans before 2014 are not in the open DocumentCenter record reached; the sequence is printed from 2014 because that is where the filed record begins in open sources, and earlier plans are a residue gap, settler the IDNR master-plan file and the Parks Board's records.
The bond-built system since 1945, at the size the record states it: the system's ground was assembled by gift and purchase, not by a founding bond — the founding fact is Bendix's 1966 gift of 175 acres — and the one bond act the open record states at full size is the latest: on 10 June 2025 the County Council approved, 6–3, up to $6.6 million in Park District bonds, the money that carries the Anderson Road ground — county-owned since 1999, cash-rented and used for material storage for some twenty-five years, master-planned in the 2023 process Parks carries — into Anderson Trail County Park. A complete bond-by-bond account of the system's building since 1945 is not stated in the plans or minutes reached and is not invented here; it stands as the second residue gap of this row, settler the County Auditor's bond register and the County Council's ordinance record.