Ice Age park bid selection delayed

Those excited for a park in Electric City will have to wait a while longer before park details and construction details are finalized.

The Electric City council chose not to accept a bid on the proposed Ice Age Park at their Jan. 14 meeting, hoping to get construction costs down.

The lowest bid for the project came in at approximately $465,000 from Spokane-based Terrabella, Inc., roughly $80,000 over the city’s proposed 2020 budget for the park. The project is to be paid, in part, with some of the $257,500 in grant money from the Washington State Recreation & Conservation Office and matched exactly by the city for a target total cost of about $515,000.

With the city supplying, separate from the bid, a restroom for about $36,000, playground equipment for about $47,000, the sewer and water hookups, plus decorative basalt and more, a desired target for the bid is somewhere around $380,000.

Rather than moving money from the city’s park fund (which has about $116,000 in it) or hotel/motel tax fund (which has about $104,000), presented as options in their meeting agenda packets, the council chose to have the parks committee see if they could recommend cutbacks on the park that could result in getting a bid closer to that $385,000, keeping the final cost of the park at about $515,000.

Mayor Diane Kohout later told The Star that the money in the parks fund is reserved for maintaining the park after it’s built, and that part of the reluctance of using that money is because they don’t want to deplete it to the point of not being able to maintain the park. Annual maintenance cost for maintaining the park are still being calculated, according to City Administrator Russ Powers.

Ken Van Voorhis, of SPVV Landscape Architects, who designed the plan for the park, explained that contractors are currently doing well, so bids for projects happen to be coming in higher recently.

Prior to the decision to delay bid acceptance, several members of the public expressed their desire to get the park built, including park committee members and parents from the community, their primary reason being that the park would benefit families in the area.

“A lot of people in this community want that park,” said Brad Parrish, who has been chairman of the park committee for around five years. “It’s not for the adults, it’s for the kids. It’s for the grandparents to watch their grandkids, or for parents to watch their kids cool off. It’s well thought out.”

The park committee is composed of Parrish, Cindy Greely, Lonna Bussert, and Ben Palmer, who were all already on the committee and will be joined by Councilmember Cate Slater, and Mark Payne, who all joined the committee at the Jan. 14 meeting.