The Portland City Council has authorized solicitation of bids for the Washington Park South Entry project.

The work will create a grand entry to the park with improved wayfinding and circulation for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists; increase sidewalks, wayfinding, and signage; and add a functional stormwater garden.

The project’s construction cost estimate, provided by the consultant team led by landscape architect 2.ink Studios and DCW Cost Management, is $5.2 million. The contract is to be awarded to the lowest responsible bidder.

Washington Park attracts 3.5 million visitors annually, Parks & Recreation Capital Project Manager Travis Ruybal stated during a City Council meeting on Sept. 28. Currently, signage for park entry is minimal and contributes to confusion and traffic backups.

Portland Parks & Recreation and its design consultants engaged the public to reach the final preferred design for the project. Community engagement began in 2015 and was completed in 2019.

The city’s land use decision requires stormwater mitigation resulting from construction of the parking lot located west of the former Portland Children’s Museum building. Implementation of this project satisfies the requirement.

Portland City Council approved the Washington Park Master Plan in 2018 to guide future development of the park.

“The South Entry Project marks the first project being implemented as part of the Washington Park Master Plan,” Ruybal said.

The total project budget is $6.83 million. It will be covered by Portland Parks & Recreation System Development Charges, Washington Park parking meter funds, ADA Transition Plan funding, Green Grant resources from the Bureau of Environmental Services, and the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Construction is estimated to begin in January 2023 and finish by May 2024.

The post Contractor sought for park improvements appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland officials are considering a sweeping, $46 million, 20-year renovation of Washington Park that would limit motor vehicle access while making improvements across the park.

Home to the Oregon Zoo, the Portland Japanese Garden and the International Rose Test Garden, Washington Park ranks as one of Portland’s largest and most-visited parks. It has not seen a significant park-wide overhaul since the early 1980s, although both the zoo and the Japanese Garden have received major upgrades since then.

Portland Parks & Recreation last week released a 106-page draft master plan that contemplates major changes for Washington Park.

Projects include:

• Revitalizing the Stearns Canyon gateway along Burnside Street by removing vegetation, relocating the Stearns Memorial Fountain and building a more attractive stop for buses and an autonomous shuttle.
• Creating a “garden plaza” near the MAX stop. A new linear garden would link the existing plaza, the Oregon Zoo and the World Forestry Center.

“You could walk directly to the zoo without crossing a lane of traffic,” said Emily Roth, senior project manager for Portland Parks & Recreation.

• Closing Rose Garden Way to vehicles and bicycles. Tennis courts would be moved, clearing space for new gardens, including a water garden and a glass-house conservatory that would hold an indoor garden. Parking at the entrance to the garden would be replaced with seasonal food carts and an outdoor promenade. The existing archery range would be retained.
• Renovating the unused train depot building into a café. Some trees would be thinned or pruned to open up views of Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood and downtown Portland.

Parks & Recreation officials said the changes would happen gradually in a two-decade period. The upgrades would be financed by Washington Park’s parking operations, which bring in about $3 million annually.

Parks & Recreation is accepting public comments on the draft master plan through Nov. 30. Staffers are expected to then finalize the master plan in early January. A presentation to the City Council would follow in February, and then a final decision would be made by Parks & Recreation Director Mike Abbaté.

Perhaps most controversially, the draft master plan resists calls for more parking. Washington Park has 1,400 parking spaces.

“Even as our population grows, we are not going to make more parking in the park,” Roth said.

Both Oregon Zoo and Japanese Garden officials requested additional parking, Roth acknowledged. Japanese Garden officials also asked for administrative offices, which Roth said cannot be built inside the park.

Parks & Recreation staffers are examining the feasibility of building a parking garage in the Sylvan area in a public-private partnership. Any parking garage would be built outside the park’s boundaries, Roth said.

“We have found we would not be spending public money on building a parking garage, because it is very expensive to build and very expensive to run,” she said.

Zoo officials are looking at other options to improve parking, including reconfiguring the existing lots to improve capacity and traffic flow.

“We think this is an important step and should be done as soon as feasible,” Oregon Zoo Director Don Moore stated in an email.

The master plan is based on recommendations from a high-level committee that included neighbors, architecture and development professionals, and Multnomah County and Metro representatives. The so-called “Champion Committee” members have agreed to advocate for the master plan for its duration, said Elizabeth Kennedy-Wong, community engagement manager for Parks & Recreation.

Place Studio served as the master plan’s lead design consultant and engaged several subcontractors.

The post Changes in store for Washington Park appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Nearly three years after design began, the land use process is over, the contractor and the city of Portland have agreed to terms, and work is impending on the Washington Park Reservoir project – a massive infrastructure effort rolling together several big goals of the city. It will involve about 100 workers a day over about eight years, an 80-foot truck turntable, two tower cranes and a 1,000-foot conveyor system.

A project like this comes along once in a career, said Teresa Elliott, chief engineer of the Portland Water Bureau.

“In the water industry, you don’t get that many big projects like this,” she said.

Though promoted last fall to her perch as chief engineer, Elliott is committed to seeing this project through, having come up through the water bureau and worked on the project from its inception.

Ensuring earthquake readiness

Seismic resiliency is a huge issue for Elliott. She said this project and another, installing an earthquake-proof drinking water pipe deep under the Willamette River, are the biggest ones the city has going.

The crossing is intended to provide a reliable backup water source for a huge swath of Portland that includes downtown. The city’s six existing crossings are buried near the river bottom and not expected to fare well in a major seismic event.

Elliott said the two projects go hand in hand.

“We’ve told people, it doesn’t do any good to have a pipeline to get reliable water across the river, if we don’t have a place to store it,” she said. “And it doesn’t do us any good to have a reliable storage site if we don’t have a pipeline to bring water.”

Generally, the project, currently estimated at a total cost of $170 million, will replace the upper of Washington Park’s two reservoirs – Reservoir 3 – with a below-ground reservoir in roughly the same footprint as the existing one. To preserve the site’s appearance, a reflecting pool will be built on top. The lower Reservoir 4 will be taken offline and the area used for landslide abatement and a bio-swale.

There are four big reasons for the project:

• First and foremost, it conforms to a 2006 federal mandate against uncovered supplies of public drinking water, known as LT-2. The city’s EPA-approved timeline specifies that design work be completed by the end of this month, and that construction begin by July 1.

• Second, the reservoirs are both 120 years old and at the end of their serviceable lives. A rubber liner has been used to keep water in Reservoir 3.

• Washington Park is located in the path of an ancient landslide. Though the city has been reducing its effects by draining underground water, the slide still moves about a quarter-inch each year. Evidence of movement is apparent all around the park, as Elliott pointed out on a site tour last week. Big gashes are visible in the 100-year-old concrete. Trees grow in “J” shapes. A drainage ditch has nearly folded over on itself.

• The new underground reservoir will feature rebar and thicker, stronger concrete as well as other design aspects intended to aid in seismic resiliency and help it survive an earthquake.

The Oregon Resilience Plan specifies that a city’s primary water system be operational 24 hours after a major seismic event. Right now, Portland isn’t there, Elliott said. And though this project includes softer amenities like wildlife habitat, for Elliott, this project is about securing a public utility well into the future.

The new reservoir has been designed to survive a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake as well as one from one of the three local faults (which could arguably do the same amount of damage, according to Elliott). A CSZ quake is said to be 15 percent likely to occur in the next 50 years.

The new structures also will be able to handle 75 years of landslide movement. A kind of engineered Styrofoam will be installed as a seismic buffer, or “compressible inclusion buffer,” between the landslide and reservoir and then backfilled over.

Originally, the site was chosen by city engineers because several natural springs arrive at the site. But today, the land has presented a number of difficulties to project engineers. (Farther uphill, the Portland Japanese Garden is practically built on top of the slide.) During the lengthy public review process, some residents wondered why the city chose to build new reservoirs in such a problematic location. Project managers believe that although the site isn’t perfect, it is the best option available.

“It’s close to the backbone system, so we won’t have to build new connections to another site, not that there’s even one available,” said Stan VandeBergh, the water bureau’s principal engineer and this project’s lead.

Portland’s drinking water originates as rainwater and snowmelt in the Bull Run watershed, 24 miles to the east. About 80 percent of the city’s water is gravity-fed, with users above the park mainly getting their water pumped.

Gravity-fed water is cheaper and greener than other options, and large-capacity water storage at Washington Park is important to maintain supply for Portlanders west of the Willamette River. Pumping facilities at the park also provide water to uphill users.

Anticipating neighborhood impacts

With infrastructure this old, historic preservation factored heavily into the design of the project. The Washington Park Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. Key to project plan was keeping the appearance of these water features.

“People cherish these here,” Elliott said. “They’re sacred ground. From day one, when they first built the park, the reservoirs were always part of the park.”

Though reticent at first, neighbors have come around to project. The worry now is over the anticipated construction impacts, according to Todd Talcott, board member of the Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association. Those include the practical effects of 100-plus workers coming and going each weekday. About 19 percent of the park’s parking will be affected, Elliott said, as well as closures to Southwest Sacajawea and Sherwood boulevards.

Talcott’s house in the quiet neighborhood is one of the closest to the project site.

“It’s a big project,” Talcott said. “It’s going to be a big part of my life. But it’s for the betterment of the city. Really, when you’re going up against a giant, that’s just how it is.”

Hoffman was hired two years ago to participate in the design process. The firm will serve as construction manager-general contractor for the project.

The deadline to finish Reservoir 3 is the end of 2019, and Reservoir 4 must be disconnected from the city’s water system by the end of 2020. Then the earth will be given two years to settle, before crews go back, evaluate and add the reflecting pools.

Work won’t fully wrap in 2024, Elliott said.

Engineers, like those who built Portland’s water system, work on a different kind of timetable.

“They were amazingly smart; they had great forethought,” Elliott said. “You figure that, 120 years ago, with the technology they had, they surveyed from Bull Run all the way to here, and came up with a gravity-fed system that’s still usable today. I think that’s pretty cool.”

The post ‘Massive’ project won’t be a walk in the park appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals has upheld the conditional use approval issued by the city of Portland for a planned expansion of the Portland Japanese Garden farther into Washington Park, dismissing concerns raised by neighboring residents.

In a final opinion released this month, LUBA sided with the city in an appeal filed by Portland architect Hilary Mackenzie, who lives near the garden. The appeal, filed last fall, claimed that the city’s approval of the garden expansion violated state requirements for public feedback because park property is involved. In the same opinion, LUBA denied a similar appeal filed shortly thereafter by three other neighbors of the garden.

The Japanese Garden Society of Oregon, a private nonprofit, operates the 5.5-acre garden on 9.1 acres leased from the city. An expansion to accommodate a growing number of garden visitors would increase that acreage to 12.5. Plans filed with the city call for construction of 11,340 square feet of new buildings, including a ticketing pavilion, administrative offices, a garden house and a café.

Mackenzie has said she filed the LUBA appeal because she believes that more people than neighbors should have received notice about the project and the chance to offer feedback because Washington Park attracts visitors from throughout the city and region. The LUBA opinion rejected this assertion, stating that the city did not violate state public input requirements by notifying only nearby neighbors of a hearing.

LUBA also dismissed Mackenzie’s concerns about the garden expansion blocking access to a popular footpath that connects to Washington Park’s popular Wildwood Trail. In the opinion, the board ruled that the city hearings officer had adequately considered this impact and noted that an alternative route to the spur trail existed.

Portland Japanese Garden spokeswoman Lisa Christy said Monday that officials are moving ahead with plans to expand the garden, but haven’t set the date for ground to be broken.

Architects Tokyo-based Kengo Kuma and Associates and Portland-based THA Architecture, along with Portland-based landscape architects Sadafumi Uchiyama and Walker Macy are designing the project. General contractor Hoffman Construction and engineering firms PAE, KPFF Consulting Engineers and Geotechnical Resources Inc. have also been hired.

The post Expansion of Portland Japanese Garden still OK appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

City planners are seeking public comments on plans to demolish a historic building and reservoirs in Portland’s Washington Park.

Bureau of Development Services staffers issued a last week, for the first of two land use review applications that Portland Water Bureau officials submitted in December. The applications are for a $76 million project to build a new underground reservoir in place of the park’s existing open-air reservoirs.

A copy of the first application is posted on the PWB website. Comments sent to city planner Hillary Adam by March 9 will be included in the official record, and a staff report will be presented at a Historic Landmarks Commission public hearing scheduled for March 23 at 1:30 p.m. in Room 2500A, 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave.

A second public hearing before the Portland City Council is scheduled for April 23 at 2 p.m. at Portland City Hall, 1221 S.W. Fourth Ave.

With the PWB’s first land use application, officials are seeking the City Council’s OK to demolish the historic Weir Building and remove portions of two reservoir basins to make way for the proposed Washington Park Reservoir Improvements Project.

Project plans call for a fountain consisting of a series of tiered pools and a nature area atop a planned 15-million-gallon underground drinking water reservoir in the footprint of one of the existing reservoirs. Washington Park’s other reservoir would be decommissioned and a lowland habitat area and reflecting pool would replace it.

PWB officials plan this spring to submit a second land use review application for construction of the new covered reservoir, reflecting pools, lowland habitat area and walkways as well as rehabilitation of historic structures nearby.

Officials announced last year that they plan to proceed with the project after receiving a mandate from the Oregon Health Authority to follow a federal regulation that outlaws the use of uncovered reservoirs to store finished drinking water. The rule is intended to reduce the risk of exposure to contaminants.

Hoffman Construction crews are scheduled to start work on the project on July 1, 2016 and wrap up in late 2020.

Public comments on the initial land use review application for the project can be emailed before March 9 to hillary.adam@portlandoregon.gov, faxed to 503-823-5630, or mailed to Hillary Adam, Land Use Services, Bureau of Development Services, RE: LU 14-249689, 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave., Suite 4500, Portland, OR 97201.

Comments submitted after March 9 can be faxed to 503-823-5630, or mailed to the Historic Landmarks Commission at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave., Suite 4500, Portland, OR 97201.

The post Public comments sought on reservoirs appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland Water Bureau officials this week submitted the first of two land use review applications for a $76 million project to build a new underground reservoir in place of Washington Park‘s existing open-air reservoirs.

With this application, officials are seeking Portland City Council‘s OK to demolish the historic Weir Building and remove portions of two reservoir basins to make way for the proposed Washington Park Reservoir Improvements Project.

Next month, the Portland Bureau of Development Services will issue a notice of public hearing and open a 71-day public comment period for that portion of the project. The public hearing date has not been set yet, Water Bureau spokeswoman Jaymee Cuti said via email.

Project plans call for a fountain consisting of a series of tiered pools and a nature area atop a planned 15-million-gallon underground drinking water reservoir in the footprint of one of the existing reservoirs. Washington Park’s other reservoir would be decommissioned and a lowland habitat area and reflecting pool would replace it.

Water Bureau officials plan to next spring submit a second land use review application for construction of the new covered reservoir, reflecting pools, lowland habitat area and walkways as well as rehabilitation of historic structures nearby.

Before building permits can be issued, land use review applications must gain city approval. This includes a historic resource review by the Historic Landmarks Commission and a conditional use and environmental review through the city hearings officer.

Water Bureau officials announced last year that they plan to proceed with the project after receiving a mandate from the Oregon Health Authority to follow a federal regulation that outlaws the use of uncovered reservoirs to store finished drinking water. The rule is intended to reduce the risk of exposure to contaminants.

Hoffman Construction crews are scheduled to start work on the project on July 1, 2016 and wrap up in late 2020.

The post $76 million reservoir project on track appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Designs for a $67 million project to cover one of Washington Park‘s historic open-air reservoirs and decommission the other are more than halfway complete, and the Portland Water Bureau is seeking public input on the latest refinements.

Water bureau officials on Wednesday will meet with members of a nine-person community sounding board committee to discuss the designs and potential construction impacts on nearby residents and businesses, bureau spokesman Tim Hall said. The group includes representatives of Portland neighborhoods surrounding the park and Portland Parks & Recreation.

Wednesday’s meeting is open to the public and will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Zion Lutheran Church, at 1015 S.W. 18th Ave.

Committee members have been meeting since the summer to develop concepts for park features in the footprint of the existing reservoirs. Community input helped water bureau officials and the project’s designer and engineer, AECOM, create plans for water features and a nature area atop a planned 15 million-gallon underground drinking water reservoir and nearby overflow and dechlorination tanks, Hall said.

“These are concepts that have been put forth by sounding board members,” he said. “This is what we heard from the community.”

City officials announced last year that they would proceed with the project after receiving a mandate from the Oregon Health Authority to follow a federal regulation that outlaws the use of uncovered reservoirs to store finished drinking water. The rule is intended to reduce the risk of exposure to contaminants.

Project plans, not yet approved by Portland City Council, call for a nature area and fountain consisting of a series of tiered pools over the new underground reservoir.

Washington Park’s other reservoir would be decommissioned and used for overflow, dechlorination and stormwater management. Based on suggestions from the sounding board group, water bureau officials are considering the addition of another water feature over the decommissioned reservoir and transforming that area into a lowland habitat area, Hall said.

Construction is scheduled to start in summer 2016 and wrap up in late 2020.

The post Washington Park reservoir designs being refined appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The Washington Park condominium complex, built in 1965 in Southwest Portland, is undergoing a renovation. The exterior of the 11-story building at 2211 S.W. Park Place is getting new windows and new metal and stucco siding. The general contractor for the project is Charter Construction and the designer is Forensic Building Consultants. Work should wrap up in spring 2011.

The post Washington Park condos renovated appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.