UPDATE: Renovation of Juanita Beach Park Slowed By Weather, Financial Issues

The renovation of Kirkland’s , a popular recreation spot on Lake Washington for some 90 years, is weeks behind schedule because of months of unusually wet weather and financial issues with the contractor, say city parks officials.

As most area residents are painfully aware, the beach portion of the 30-acre park has been closed since May 2010. The city and contractor, DMSL Inc. of Arlington, had hoped the work would be finished and the park reopened in a year or sooner, by April or May.

Now the hope is that people will be back wading, picnicking, birdwatching and enjoying new trails, a waterfront promenade, plaza and wetlands area by July.

“La Nina and the economy have made it a challenge for the contractor,” says Michael Cogle, deputy director of Kirkland Parks and Community Services, referring to the term for ocean flows that often bring inordinate rainfall.

“We’ll go beyond the 12-month estimate a little ways. We’re getting close to summer and we know how important the park is to the community.”

There has been no public outcry about the closure and apparent slow pace of the work. But residents have noticed a lack of activity on rainy days--and they have been numerous over the winter and spring–as well as a small work force on days when weather does allow activity at the site.

And the parks department is hearing about it.

“It has been a source of frustration for the community because they want to use the park,” says Jason Filan, parks operations manager.

The wet weather is impeding progress on the $1.18 million renovation in multiple ways. Concrete cannot be poured for the new accessible promenade that will meander just upland of the beach. Asphalt cannot be laid down for the new parking area. Earth-moving equipment being used to re-contour the uplands in patterns that prevent runoff from the parking lot and lawns gets mired down in saturated dirt.

“You can’t do finish grading, you can’t add soil amendments and do your planting,” says Cogle. “We’ve had so much rain this month alone that has stopped them from doing what we hoped.”

Cogle added that the financial issues of DMSL have been more troubling, but that work is proceeding.

“I wish I had more details from them, but they have had periods when they had cash flow issues” and “couldn’t pay their subcontractors,” he says. “It has slowed them a bit.”

The city pays only for work that has been completed, and Cogle noted that the economic climate for construction loans is very poor.

Mike Sisk, project manager for DMSL, said the horrible weather has been the biggest issue, but acknowledged that the economic situation right now, for construction companies especially, is also terrible.

"It has to do with keeping subcontractors on schedule," he said. "It's pretty much what everybody is going through right now. We've had trouble collecting money ourselves, and the banks are real tight with construction loans. It's been very frustrating."

However, Sisk said the project is moving along and vowed the company will see it through.

"We are moving forward and can see the light at the end of the tunnel," he said. "We realize how popular the park is. We want to get it done. We take pride in the project."

Indeed, there has been noticeable progress at the site.

The wetlands area along Juanita Creek has been sculpted and prepared for planting with native vegetation. It is connected to and will be fed at higher flows by the creek, which still serves as spawning habitat for the lake’s cutthroat trout population and still sees a few salmon return most years.

The wetlands are designed not only to provide habitat for fish and wildlife, but also to act as a basin to settle and filter pollutants coming from upstream. A bridge will cross the creek and connect the main park area with a trail through the wetlands area.

“It will provide habitat for the myriad of wildlife we see in Juanita Bay–beaver, otter, waterfowl,” says Cogle.

One of the goals of the project was to address water quality and siltation problems in Juanita Bay that have over the decades seriously degraded the quality of the park itself.

The park site first became a popular recreational area as a in the 1920s, after the lowering of Lake Washington by 8.8 feet for the Ballard Locks in 1916-17 left a broad sandy beach there.

Longtime residents remember when water depths allowed swimming from the docks that semi-circle the beach. But over the past couple of decades, siltation has filled in the swimming area and rendered it too shallow.

Fecal coliform levels in the water often rise in summertime to unhealthy levels, resulting in closures of the beach by county health authorities. That also accelerates the growth of algae and aquatic vegetation that makes swimming and wading altogether unpleasant.

It is believed this is being caused primarily by the lake’s large population of Canada geese, which have found the lawn areas of the park ideal for feeding–not to mention well-meaning visitors who regularly break city rules by feeding the fowl. But the unhealthy fecal coliform levels are exacerbated by the shallow depth and lack of summertime water flows in the bay, as well as pollutants coming into the bay from the creek.

The new wetlands area should help improve water quality and the re-contouring of the uplands should make the park less attractive to the geese, says Cogle, although there will still be areas of lawn.

Concrete has been poured for much of the promenade, and the site prepared for a small adjacent plaza and amphitheater-like commons area that can host music and other arts performances. Rain gardens and swales to prevent runoff into the lake have been shaped.

The park will be replanted with trees and shrubs to replace several mature trees, mostly cottonwoods, that created a bit of a stir last year when they were cut down.

“We had a lot of trees at the end of their life span,” says Cogle. “Cottonwoods tend to be susceptible to disease and wind damage.”

The park was owned by King County before it was acquired by the city in 2003. Sometime in the past many of the old cottonwoods had been topped, which is now a practice considered unhealthy by arborists. The city decided to remove the old trees during the renovation.

“Some people felt that, boy, that was a significant change in the park they had known,” says Cogle.

When the work is done, park visitors will find native vegetation planted along some of the formerly broad, open beach area. Cogle says some people might not like that change, but that it was required by state, federal and tribal resource agencies in the permitting process.

“The park will have a different look than it has had in the past decades.”

In the meantime, the primary focus is on getting the work finished and the park back open to the public.

“The concern is that we do everything we can to make sure the contractor does everything it can to get it done by summer,” says Cogle. “I think the park being closed one summer is enough.”

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Editor's Note: This original version of this story was posted on April 7 and was updated on April 8 with the addition of comments by the project contractor, DMSL Inc.