The Town Square Park redesign is at the top of its $1.7 million budget after the Federal Way City Council unanimously approved a $68,000 increase to one of the firm’s contract last week at a council meeting.
Henderson Partners, the firm responsible for doing earth work at the park, is the first of at least three other contractors who will work on constructing a restroom, picnic shelter, spray park and incorporating electrical and lighting, among other improvements.
Constructed in summer 2014, the council approved the park’s redesign this past summer to expand it and implement restrooms, a spray park and a larger grass lawn, among other improvements. The redesign began over the summer with a budget of $1.5-1.7 million and won’t be complete until next summer.
Steve Ikerd, the Parks and Recreation deputy director for the city of Federal Way, said while the contractor was doing groundwork, they found it would save the city money for them to take on more work as they already had large equipment on the park’s property.
“Because of the new addition of some upgrades from LID (Low Impact Development) from public works here … we now have got to go back and kind of redesign some things,” Ikerd said at the meeting. “So for example, the sidewalk instead of a 3-inch rock base under, it will need to go to more of a 6-inch rock because we’re going to be putting previous concrete on top of it.”
The “redesign” to the redesign Ikerd is referring to is the additional $400,000 stormwater outreach project and educational center that was added to the park in mid-September.
Technically, the funds for that project come from a separate source, Storm Water Utility user fees, which was allocated for the project years ago. Still, that totals $2.1 million of city funds invested into Town Square Park, not including the some-hundred thousands of dollars spent on the first, smaller version in 2014.
But Ikerd said this increase to Henderson Partners’ contract could end up saving the city money in the long-run.
“While he’s there with the big equipment, it’s much more cost effective to have him do that than for us to try to do it ourselves or bring in another contractor,” he said. “The future bids we’ll be looking at here won’t be coming in with that size of equipment.”
The work this firm will do on the stormwater project includes digging out land for the project’s rain garden and moving the land to the south side of the park to level a slope instead of transporting the soil off-site.
Yet, Councilwoman Kelly Maloney questioned if this would be the last budget increase request.
Ikerd responded that was what the city was anticipating but they won’t know for sure until they get the bids for the other improvements.
In addition to doing the earth work and infrastructure for the park, Henderson Partners will plant the park’s 25-30-foot holiday tree on Nov. 5 with AmeriCorps planting trees Nov. 20 and Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, Jan. 15-18.
