NILES — It could cost upwards of $250,000 to restore Island Park to its former glory, but city leaders hope that acquiring a bid for bridge repairs could be a first step in bringing the park back to life.

On Monday night during a regularly scheduled meeting, Mayor Nick Shelton motioned for council members to begin the solicitation for bids to repair the bridge. Council members voted 7-1 in support.

Island Park was damaged during a historic flood last year in February and has remained closed ever since. During a committee of the whole meeting April 8, council members began discussing whether decommissioning the Fourth Ward park could be an option to save on costly repairs. Other options included full or partial restoration of the park, which many community members have expressed a desire to keep in operation.

Monday afternoon, several city council members and officials toured Island Park to get a sense of the damage. Shelton described more than two feet of potentially contaminated silt layering the park and a host of other dangers, including uprooted trees and precariously hanging branches.

“There are just astronomical costs associated with repair of the island,” Shelton said. “I know that we are a community that has other things that require our attention, too, like our downtown sidewalks. We have firetrucks that are near the end of their lifespan and police cars that are the same.”

However, Shelton said he knows the park is important to many residents. With a window of time allotted for insurance money to help with repairs, he said now was the best time to act and restore the bridge.

According to City Administrator Ric Huff, the bridge would cost about $80,000 to repair. He approximated that insurance funds could cover up to about $66,000 of that cost. This would leave the city to pick up the remaining tab, which Huff estimated to be between $20,000 to $30,000. He added that the call for bids does not mean that the city will have to accept one, though Huff said the city does not like to do that to contractors.

If the city did accept a bid for bridge restoration, it would be the first of many steps to restoring the park. The park would need other significant repairs, namely removing the silt, debris and fixing or removing damaged play equipment. Until mitigated, the park would remain closed. Due to this, Daniel VandenHeede said it did not seem right to pay for a bridge to a shuttered park, and he voted in opposition to the motion.

“I don’t know that that’s the best use of our funds — to repair a bridge that will essentially not go anywhere at this point,” VandenHeede said.

VandenHeede also brought up another major concern discussed during the earlier committee of the whole meeting: that the island has been susceptible to flooding in the past. According to Huff, the park has flooded 12 times in the last nine years. With each flood, the city has paid between $3,000 and $5,000 to replace swept away mulch from the play area.

While VandenHeede said he understood the desire to restore the park, he said he felt that it does not make financial sense.

Huff said there could be other benefits to having a working bridge, even if the park is not open, including giving authorities emergency access to the park if needed.

Shelton said he had received feedback from many residents asking for the park to be saved. Some, he said, have volunteered their time and funds to restore the park. Even as he sat in the meeting Monday, he said his phone continually buzzed from comments about the issue.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Shelton said he was working with park board and city officials to potentially set up a fundraising mechanism and organize a way to let people volunteer safely.

In the meeting Monday, he encouraged those who care about the park to show support.

“Though it may not make sense to repair a bridge without reopening a park, in my opinion, it’s a sign of good faith that we do want to see Island Park reopen at some point,” Shelton said. “Maybe our community will step up to the plate and offer their time, their resources and their dollars to help repair the park that they really love.”