If you spend your Saturdays at London Bridge Beach, you'd probably bet the city's new splash pad ends up right there on the Island, a few yards from where your dog already knows the fence line at Lions Dog Park. That's the natural assumption. It's where the sand is, where the kids already play, where the boats already tie up along the shore.
The shortlist the city is actually working from tells a different story. Of the four sites under real consideration, three sit across the channel. Only one touches the Island at all.
The Four Sites the City Actually Put on the Table
At a recent Parks and Recreation Advisory Board meeting, Assistant City Manager and acting Parks and Recreation Director Anthony Kozlowski walked the board through four candidate locations for a future splash pad. The board didn't vote on a winner that night, but it did narrow the list to one option for further study. Here's what was actually on the table:
- Option A: the mainland side, at the western end of Rotary Community Park, near the mouth of Bridgewater Channel
- Option B: the Aquatic Center, replacing the splash pad that's already there
- Option C: the Island side, at the southern end of London Bridge Beach, near the mouth of the channel
- Option D: a greenspace at Rotary Community Park, west of the existing toddler playground
Only one lone resident, Keely Lundin, showed up to weigh in in person. Board members and city staff worked through the tradeoffs of each site on their own.
One of Those Four Isn't Really "New"
Look closer at Option B and the math shifts again. The Aquatic Center already has a splash pad. Choosing that site wouldn't add a new spot to the map, it would swap out the one that's already running. That leaves three sites that would genuinely put water play somewhere it doesn't currently exist: Option A, Option C, and Option D.
Two of those three, Options A and D, are the same park. Both sit inside Rotary Community Park on the mainland, just in different corners of it. The Island's only entry, Option C at London Bridge Beach, is outnumbered two to one before anyone's even weighed which site has better parking or drainage.
None of this means the Island site is out. It means the assumption that "the beach is the obvious answer" doesn't hold up against the actual shortlist. Geography is working against London Bridge Beach here, not for it.
What the South End of London Bridge Beach Already Does
Part of why Option C isn't a slam dunk is that the ground it would occupy isn't empty. The southern end of London Bridge Beach already carries a full slate of uses. Public restrooms sit on the island side of the channel, along with a fenced-in dog park, volleyball courts, and a kids play area, all at London Bridge Beach. That's Lions Dog Park and the volleyball courts most Islanders already treat as fixed points on their weekend.
The beach itself does double duty as a boat pull-up. The Bridgewater Channel is a narrow ribbon of "no-wake" navigable water that runs beneath the London Bridge, bordered by sandy beaches where boaters "beach" to rest, socialize, and tan year-round. On a summer weekend, that stretch of sand is already carrying foot traffic, paw traffic, volleyball games, and a rotating cast of boats nosed up against the shoreline. Adding a splash pad footprint there means finding room among all of that, not building on open ground.
Walk a few minutes north along the water and you're on the Havasu Memorial Walkway, which meanders along the channel for about a mile and a half from its far end to the skate park, a route locals already use for sunset strolls. Loop back toward the water and you're within an easy walk of Shugrue's, which has served the Island for more than 30 years with a dining room looking straight out over the channel and the bridge, or Javelina Cantina, tucked behind the free parking lot most boaters and walkers already use on that side of the water. Head the other direction and you're at the Nautical Beachfront Resort, the Island's only beachfront resort, where the Turtle Grille and Naked Turtle Beach Bar already anchor a stretch of shoreline built around toes-in-the-sand time.
None of that changes regardless of where the splash pad lands. But it's worth understanding just how much is already happening on that particular strip of sand before assuming there's obvious room to add more.
The Case for Rotary Park, Twice Over
Rotary Community Park's advantage isn't charm, it's redundancy. The city floated two separate corners of the same park as candidate sites, which means if a mainland location wins out, city staff and the board already have two different layouts to choose between within the same piece of land. One sits at the western edge near the channel mouth. The other sits west of the existing toddler playground, likely easier to tie into infrastructure that's already built for small kids.
That's a meaningfully different starting position than the Island's single shot. Option C has to work as proposed, sharing beach frontage with the dog park, the volleyball courts, and the boat traffic. Options A and D get to compete against each other for which spot inside the same mainland park makes more sense, with the flexibility to adjust the footprint if the first pick runs into trouble.
What Happens Next
The board's decision to send one option forward for further exploration doesn't mean money is allocated or shovels are anywhere close to the ground. It means city staff will keep working through the specifics of whichever site moved forward, and that work will eventually come back for another public airing. If you want to see it before it's decided, city council and advisory board meetings are open to residents. The meeting where these four sites were first laid out drew exactly one member of the public.
Whichever way it lands, the Island's existing rhythm along the channel, the dog park, the walkway, the boats beaching on the sand, the long dinner at Shugrue's, holds steady in the meantime. A splash pad is a nice-to-have layered on top of a stretch of shoreline that already works hard for the people who live near it.
If you're already calling the Island home and want to keep an eye on what's changing along the water, or you're weighing what life on this stretch of Lake Havasu actually looks like day to day, The Denovan Group knows this shoreline block by block. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's happening here.
