You Are Current reported that Fishers Director of Recreation and Wellness Jake Reardon-McSoley told the city's Board of Public Works on June 23: "It's very important to have a really strong stand of grass before we open it to the community, and we actually have a sold-out dog park membership base." He was explaining why the dog park, one of the Fishers Community Center's original amenities, still doesn't have a firm open date, just over ten months after the center's original amenities opened.
If you've walked or driven past Johnson Farm Way this summer, you already know the building itself is not the problem. The pools are running. The track has laps on it every morning. What's still sitting behind a chain-link fence is two acres of dirt that keeps refusing to turn into grass, and it happens to be the one feature Fishers residents ranked above all others when the city first asked what to build.
The Feature Fishers Asked For First
Back in 2021, a steering committee led by City Councilor Todd Zimmerman surveyed nearly 3,500 residents about what an indoor recreation facility should include. The dog park wasn't a footnote. It was one of the top requests, alongside an indoor track, an indoor playground, and an aquatics facility, and city officials repeated that ranking in press materials for years afterward as justification for the $60 million project.
By the time membership presales opened this spring, that priority showed up in the numbers. The two-acre dog park, split into a large-dog and small-dog section with its own lighting, water fountains, and security cameras, sold out its membership allotment before a single leash ever touched the ground inside it. Everything else on the center's original amenity list opened to the public on schedule. The dog park did not.
The Original Amenities Opened On Time
The Fishers Community Center opened November 1, 2025, after about 20 months of construction, and it delivered on the rest of the 2021 wish list without much drama. The aquatics center runs Central Indiana's first NinjaCross system alongside a standard lap pool and a zero-depth warm water pool. The city's first public indoor track sits on a 1/9-mile loop above the gymnasium. The two-story indoor playground, strengthened by Riley Children's Health, is free to any visitor who books a Community Pass. Sahm's operates the café on the first floor, and the Fishers Health Department relocated its headquarters and clinic into the same building, adding travel vaccinations to its services roster.
In its report on the preview tour ahead of opening day, You Are Current quoted Mayor Scott Fadness calling the building "the epicenter" of the city's culture-of-health push, and for the amenities that were ready, that framing held up. The dog park was the exception among the original amenities, and it has stayed that way for just over ten months now.
Grass, Not Money, Is the Holdup
The reason isn't funding. The city already owns the land, the fencing is in, and the membership revenue is sitting collected rather than pending. The problem is agronomic. Reardon-McSoley told the board that the center tried to establish the lawn by seeding the 92,000-square-foot field, and it didn't take.
So on June 23, the Board of Public Works and Public Safety approved a roughly $160,000 contract with Kelly Landscaping LLC to start over with sod instead. The process is not fast: the entire field gets sprayed with weed killer, that treatment sits for ten days, then crews drag and rake the ground before laying new sod over a rebuilt drainage system. Reardon-McSoley described the decision as "kind of pivoting and now giving the reins to our own City of Fishers DPW team" rather than continuing to rely on the original contractor's seeding approach.
The city's own public language has settled on "this fall" as the target, and as of the most recent board update, no firmer date has been attached to that. For a membership base that already sold out, that's the update worth knowing: your dog park exists, it's fenced, it's paid for, and it is waiting on turf to root.
| Amenity | Status as of the June 23 board meeting |
|---|---|
| Aquatics center, track, playground, gym | Open since November 1, 2025 |
| Fishers Health Department, Sahm's café | Open since November 1, 2025 |
| Dog park (2 acres, two sections) | Sod contract awarded, targeted for fall |
| Rooftop exercise studio | $1.988 million contract awarded, design phase |
A Rooftop Studio Added to the Plans
While the board was solving the grass problem, it also approved something that wasn't part of the original resident survey at all. Cost savings realized during the center's original construction are now funding a new rooftop exercise studio, a roughly $2 million addition that the board authorized the same day as the sod contract. Williams Architecture, the same firm that designed the original center, will handle the studio's design as well.
The two projects are at different stages: the dog park is waiting for sod, while the rooftop studio remains in the design phase. Their progress reflects different construction timelines within the same building.
What "This Fall" Means for Anyone With a Membership
If you bought into that sold-out dog park membership base, the practical read is this: the two-acre field with the drainage system and the fresh sod is the last major piece of the original 2021 amenity list to open, and the city has committed publicly to a fall opening without narrowing it further than that. The dog park's own rules, ages 13 and up, minors accompanied by an adult, are already posted on the center's FAQ page, which suggests the operational side is ready to go the moment the turf can hold foot traffic.
For everyone else in Fishers, the more interesting takeaway might be what this says about how the city sequences big public projects. The Community Center wasn't held up by money or by design. It was held up by grass needing ten days to sit under weed killer before crews could even start prepping the ground. If you've ever waited on your own new sod to take root, you already know why that timeline resists shortcuts.
Johnson Farm Way is a quieter address than the Nickel Plate District or 116th Street, but it's become one of the more talked-about spots in Fishers this year precisely because of the pieces still catching up to the rest of the building. The city has not announced a specific opening date, so watch city board meetings this fall for updates.
Fishers keeps building things residents specifically asked for, and this is a good example of how that process actually plays out once the ribbon gets cut on the bigger building and one stubborn detail still has to catch up. If you're watching how a neighborhood invests in itself before you decide where to put down roots of your own, that's exactly the kind of local signal worth following. For more on what's actually happening in Fishers and the neighborhoods around it, reach out to Reggie Jackson for a look at the area beyond the headlines.
