PORT ANGELES — The city’s new 1.5-acre waterfront park has been held up by permitting delays, but it will be substantially complete in about seven weeks — almost three months later than planned.
“Our target is Sept. 5,” Port Angeles civil engineer Steve Zenovic, the park project’s design team coordinator, said Tuesday.
“June 21 was the original target date.”
But don’t expect to see much in the way of green at what the city has informally dubbed West End Park until well into the fall.
The drought will likely prevent workers from laying sod at the Railroad Avenue-Oak Street site until October.
“At this point, we will refrain from any plantings that are going to require consistent watering,” Nathan West, community and economic development director, said Tuesday.
But most elements of phase 2 of the $17 million improvement project will be finished enough to allow the site to host the Sept. 5 Jammin’ in the Park festival, scheduled from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The park’s kickoff event is sponsored by Nor’wester Rotary and Koenig Subaru.
Zenovic, a longtime Nor’wester Rotary member and a past president, is helping organize the get-together.
It will include seven bands, a beer and wine garden, a celebrity dunk tank — and a beach volleyball tournament at one of two newly developed, sandy pocket beaches.
West said no ribbon-cutting ceremony has yet been planned and that Jammin’ in the Park would, in effect, herald its opening.
The two beaches — one 80 feet by 200 feet, the other 80 feet by 130 feet — fringe the shoreline.
Three courts will be at the site and ready by the Sept. 5 festival for “classic” beach volleyball, Zenovic said.
During winter, the beaches proved to be well-protected from the elements.
“They are designed to handle bigger storms,” Zenovic said.
He said concrete for the park plazas was being poured Tuesday.
Zenovic, whose firm Zenovic & Associates Inc. is the lead engineering firm for the project, said complicated permitting requirements held up the project.
Phase 2 includes development of northern and southern connections to Olympic Discovery Trail, which requires state Department of Transportation permitting, a plaza turnaround and dedicated public gathering areas.
Improvements also will include truck access for High Tide Seafoods and other natural-resources-related businesses, a required feature for a state Department of Natural Resources permit.
And the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permitted creation of the beaches, which required at least 2,000 yards of sand from a pit west of Port Angeles.
Zenovic said it became more feasible to segregate the permits rather than combine them.
“It’s a park that has three different elements to it,” he explained.
“We broke it into separate permits by virtue of how the agencies work.”
He added that Transportation “does not want to hear about beaches, but if it’s in their scope, they have to pay attention to it.”
Phase 2 has required 13 permits and three National Environmental Policy Act assessments.
Other agencies involved in the planning, design, financing, construction, operation or use of the park include the Port of Port Angeles, Clallam County Economic Development Corp., Lower Elwha Klallam and Jamestown S’Klallam tribes, the state Community and Economic Revitalization Board, the state Recreation and Conservation Office, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The park is part of a city Waterfront Transportation Improvement Plan that has already seen an esplanade constructed along Railroad Avenue.
The plan envisions waterfront improvements that stretch west of the park, at Valley Creek Estuary just west of the park, to Hollywood Beach, about a quarter-mile east of the park.
West said in an earlier interview that permitting issues also unexpectedly raised the cost of phase 2 to $3.9 million.
Of that amount, $2.7 million is construction and $745,000 design engineering.
The project has received more than $1.7 million in state and federal grants.
West said at least $8.5 million has been spent on the entire waterfront improvement project.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
