Richmond Village President Toni Wardanian doesn’t know if the community has ever offered an ice rink for its residents, either on a frozen pond or in a park.

But it does now. The Village Board agreed to use some of the local tax revenue from the Spark’d marijuana dispensary to buy and install an outdoor rink at McConnell Park. It opened to the public Friday.

“It is not the cooling kind” of rink, with coils under the ice to keep it usable in warmer temps, Wardanian said. Instead, the rink is dependent on cold air to keep it frozen.

“We are trying to step up on our parks since we have the dispensary money,” Wardanian said. “We are trying to do the things that got pushed to the back burner” when village money was tight.

The dispensary on Route 12 opened in 2023. Since the 1% tax charged by the village began coming in, Richmond has averaged $18,000 to $20,000 a month from it, she said.

Much of those funds has gone toward parks and other capital projects that would not have received funding. Richmond has decided to not use those tax monies to hire additional staff.

“We don’t want to use [dispensary income] on operating costs. If, God forbid, the dispensary closes” the village would have staff or programs it could not longer pay for, Wardanian said.

The ice rink cost Richmond about $9,000 and was purchased from NiceRink, a Genoa City, Wisconsin-based company that specializes in backyard ice rinks.

“It was a kit, and since they are just up the road, they came over and gave us advice” on setting up the rink Wardanian said.

The rink will be open from dawn to dusk, and a sign at the park will be updated by public works employees to indicate when it’s open or closed on days that may be too warm for good ice.

“It will be closed if it is too mushy,” Wardanian said. “Public works is on it. We have a tiny, five-person department” that worked hard to get the site ready over the summer and the rink open in 2026.

There is a hockey goal on the ice if any users want to play some pickup games.

“It is humongous – the size of a regulation hockey rink,” Wardanian said. Rink users will need to bring their own skates and hockey sticks, however.

Richmond has used some of the marijuana tax money to put concrete chess boards in a park near a senior housing complex, redo a patio there, put in new “matching garbage cans” downtown and provide benches and seating at a park off Main Street.

More street work should be coming too. The Richmond Village Board in 2025 took advantage of a 2024 change in Illinois law that allows small municipalities without home rule to raise their sales tax rates by up to 1% without voter approval.

That change is expected to bring Richmond an additional $500,000 a year for its roads, Wardanian said.

With only one small, independent grocery store in town, the board did not vote to keep charging a local sales tax for food.

“They are small and fight for customers” and losing the store would be a loss for Richmond, she added.