When Julie Guy co-founded the Meridian/Cordata Neighborhood Association in 2005 she had one main goal in mind: to push the city to provide parks and trails for residents in the Cordata neighborhood.
Today, that goal stands half-fulfilled. The City of Bellingham purchased a 20-acre parcel of land for Cordata Park but as the economy took a downward turn and funds dried up, so did prospects for development.
“We’re here in 2012 and we still don’t have a single playground or picnic area that families can go to in the north end,” Guy said.
When planning for the site began back in 2007, the economy was still good in good shape, Guy said. Development was initially supposed to take place between 2010 and 2012, she said. However, since then, the city has been having a hard time coming up with funding for parks.
“When the mayor has to start cutting the budget things like parks and playgrounds are low priority against service like fire, police, and education,” Guy said.
The project started when Guy and members of the neighborhood association approached the City of Bellingham in 2005 with requests for funds and resources.
“I moved [to Bellingham] from Alaska, took a look around and thought, ‘where are the parks, where are the trails?’” Guy said. “There are lots of parks in the south end, we need parks up here too.”
Guy realized that under the state Growth Management Act, the city must provide services including parks for neighborhoods as their populations expand. She used this as leverage in her campaign to get a park in Cordata.
“We had to continuously work and finally, after we had been campaigning for two years the mayor found the money to buy one park,” she said.
In 2007, the city approved $1 million from the real estate excise tax to buy the 20-acre parcel of land for the park from Trillium Corp.
As the city started to develop a master plan for the park, it invited community members to become part of the process by outlining their goals for the site, said Design and Development Manager Gina Austin.
The final master plan includes restrooms, picnic areas, trails, a play area, a skateboard park, and areas of the park set aside for wetland preservation.
The project is estimated to cost between $3 million and $4 million total, according to the Cordata Park Master Plan.
The city spent around $1 million doing environmental assessment on the site and in 2010 and 2011 finished developing a half-mile trail through the park, Austin said. It was at this point that the city started to run out of funding for the project, she said.
Projects such as this one are funded in a variety of ways including real estate excise taxes, park impact fees, greenway levies, and state and federal grants.
The state of the economy factors into why this project is currently at a standstill, Austin said. When a person or company buys and develops land, they pay into the real estate excise tax and park impact fees which help fund these projects. With the economy the way it is, there’s little current development happening and as a result, there is less money to build parks with, she said.
The city has been working on applying for grants and brainstorming ideas for how to generate funds for the park, she said.
In addition to the lack in funds for developing the park, there is currently no road that goes out to the land where the parking lot for the park is planned. To begin further developing the park, Horton Road needs to be extended to the land where the parking lot will be situated, Austin said.
Bellingham Public Works is currently working with contracted consultants to evaluate how much state-protected wetlands will be affected by the development of the road.
Once the road is complete, the city can continue development on the park, funds permitting.
Guy said she would like to see the park finished within the next five or six years but she’s not sure how realistic that goal is.
Without the road to the site in place and limited funding, it’s difficult to say when the project will be complete, Austin said.
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