Ocean View Is Finally Building Its Second Park, One Year Behind Schedule
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive out to the corner of Muddy Neck and Double Bridges Roads today and there is still nothing to see. A stretch of upland coastal forest and marsh the town bought back in 2023 with grant money, waiting on a contractor. For two budget cycles now, Ocean View's own paperwork has promised that this would be the fall construction starts. Last year it wasn't. This year, according to the town manager's own account, it finally is.
That one-year slip is not a story about a stalled project or a town that overpromised. It is a story about why a small municipal park depends on a much bigger project it doesn't control, and what that means for anyone who already walks, bikes, or drives past that corner on the way into or out of town.
Ocean View's FY2026 budget, adopted in early 2025, said construction on what the town calls the Berzins Nature Park and Trail was scheduled to begin in the fall of 2025. It didn't. The town manager's more recent message to residents reframes the timeline plainly: the development contract has now been let, with an anticipated fall 2026 start.
The reason isn't buried in a footnote. The town has said outright that the project benefits from a high level of grant funding and links with Delaware Department of Transportation improvements along Double Bridges Road, and that there's added synergy with the state's own planned expansion of the Assawoman Trail, a project still under design at the state level. In other words, Ocean View didn't just build a park on its own schedule. It built its schedule around someone else's, betting that timing construction to align with state road and trail work would be worth a delay. The town has already put over $1 million toward buying, designing, and building the park, and its newest capital budget, adopted this year, adds another $560,000 specifically to the Nature Park line item. That's not a project sitting idle. That's a project that finally has both the design and the money lined up in the same fiscal year, which is a different thing than a groundbreaking date on a press release.
For residents, the practical takeaway is that Berzins isn't a rumor anymore. It's a funded, contracted, fall 2026 construction start, tied to state work that will eventually make it more useful, not less, once both pieces are finished.
According to the town's own planning documents, the finished park will include:
None of this replaces John West Park, the town's established gathering spot on West Avenue. It adds a second kind of park entirely, one built around passive nature access rather than events and recreation. The two properties will likely function very differently once Berzins opens.
| John West Park | Berzins Nature Park and Trail | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Open and in regular use | Construction anticipated fall 2026 |
| Character | Community events, fitness trail, playground | Boardwalk, forest trail, outdoor classroom |
| Connects to | Town center, West Avenue | Assawoman Trail expansion (state, in design) |
This fall, the town's civic calendar still runs almost entirely through John West Park. Cops & Goblins, the Ocean View Police Department's Halloween festival, is confirmed in the town's own FY2027 budget for Saturday, Oct. 24, from 1 to 4 p.m. The event has been running since 2015 and is now well past its tenth year, which puts it among the more durable traditions on the town's calendar. Past editions have featured a costume contest with categories for Best Cop, Best Goblin, and Best Overall, free burgers, hot dogs, and pizza, a petting zoo, and a local DJ piping Halloween movie themes through the park while judges, including the mayor, hand out prizes.
John West Park is also where the town installed its fitness trail, listed on the town's public notices page as installed and ready to use, and where past summers have brought a Concerts in the Park series with acts like Love Seed Mama Jump and Funsters, plus Classic Movie Theme Nights that have shown titles like The Goonies and Jaws under the park lights. The Old Town Holiday Market and tree lighting typically follows Cops & Goblins in late November, closing out the park's fall run before winter.
The practical read for anyone living nearby is that the town isn't waiting on Berzins to have somewhere to gather this season. It's leaning harder on the park it already has while the new one gets built.
Cops & Goblins doesn't run on the town's general budget alone. The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 16 holds an annual golf tournament at Bear Trap Dunes Golf Club to help cover the cost, with tickets running $125 for golf and dinner or $40 for the barbecue alone, and a dine-and-donate night at Ocean View Brewing Company adds to the pot ahead of the event. It's a small, local funding chain: a golf club, a brewery, and a police department fundraiser, all feeding one free afternoon in the park. That kind of layered, hyperlocal financing is common in a town this size, and it's part of why the event has lasted as long as it has.
The town's food scene has its own version of continuity and change. OVR, the diner at 42 Atlantic Avenue long known simply as Ocean View Restaurant, changed hands in 2023 when local restaurateur Roger Schwandtner took it over, kept many of the original family recipes, and shortened the name. It's still open daily for breakfast and lunch and most evenings for dinner, and it's still the kind of place regulars mean when they say they're headed to the diner.
A few minutes down Route 26, just over the line in Millville, Surf Siren Kitchen & Bar has been drawing strong recent reviews, with diners specifically calling out chef and owner Jennifer's cooking. Close enough that Ocean View residents treat it as part of their own rotation even though the address technically sits in the next town. Back inside Ocean View proper, Coastal Kitchen at Bear Trap Dunes, the same golf club that hosts the Cops & Goblins fundraiser, serves a coastal-leaning menu built around dishes like tuna pomodoro and spicy cilantro shrimp, while The Cafe on 26 rounds out the list of spots residents consistently point newcomers toward.
None of this is a ranking. It's a snapshot of a small town's dining options doing what small towns do: staying mostly the same while ownership and menus shift underneath.
What ties this fall together in Ocean View is less any single event than the fact that the town is visibly operating on two different clocks at once. John West Park runs on its own established rhythm, event to event, funded by a mix of town budget and local fundraising. Berzins Nature Park and Trail runs on a slower, state-linked timeline that only now, a year later than first promised, has money and a contract behind it. Residents don't need to track a state trail design process to notice the difference. They'll notice it when the equipment finally shows up at Muddy Neck and Double Bridges, a year after the town said it would.
Ocean View keeps investing in the kind of infrastructure that only becomes obvious once it's finished, a boardwalk over a wetland, a fitness trail already worn in, a Halloween festival that's outlasted most of the businesses that first sponsored it. Bobbi Prescott has spent more than two decades watching this stretch of the Delaware coast, and is always glad to talk through what a season like this one actually means for the town.
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