Eagle Bay Community Park’s facelift will continue.
At the Jan. 16 board meeting, Columbia Shuswap Regional District electoral area directors approved $88,000 from the Electoral Area C Parks Capital Reserve Fund to complete landscaping at the park.
The money will be used to go forward with a request for proposals (RFP) ahead of the March 31 Columbia Shuswap Regional District board budget adoption so that construction of the remaining soft landscape improvements can begin as soon as weather permits.
In June 2020, the CSRD was granted a statutory right of way for park purposes on the Eagle Bay Community Hall Association lands, located at 4326 Eagle Bay Rd. The civil engineering firm of McElhanney was retained to prepare design drawings for the park construction in spring 2022. The project was tendered the same year and awarded to Steelewood Construction, who completed their contract in March 2024.
Improvements installed up to that spring included a sport court, vault toilet and a picnic shelter. Work continued in the summer with the installation of playground and fitness equipment, playground safety surfacing, and gravel paths to coincide with a soft opening of the playground for the Eagle Bay Days event.
What’s left on the improvement agenda is approximately 1,000 square metres of soft landscaping that would include clearing and grubbing of the existing unfinished landscape areas, grading, import of growing medium, design and installation of CSRD supplied irrigation components and the establishment of a turf ground cover.
A significant investment of time and money has been undertaken to bring the Eagle Bay Community Hall Park construction to completion, with cost escalations and delays. This created challenges for the CSRD’s partner, the Eagle Bay Community Hall Association and delayed the community in accessing a completed park.
Electoral Area C director Marty Gibbons directed staff on Dec. 19, 2024 to proceed with a request to utilize parks capital reserve funds for the completion of the park improvements, so that the community can enjoy the completed park in 2025.
The RFP for the remaining work is proposed to be funded by the approximately $12,000 remaining in the approved budget, and up to $70,000 of the Electoral Area C Parks capital reserve fund and an additional $18,000 from taxation.
Gibbons was right on board with this park project. He told directors the project definitely experienced a number of setbacks for a number of years, going back to before he became the Area C director.
“Saying it had gone off the rails would probably be an appropriate explanation of it,” he said, expressing his thanks to CSRD staff for prioritizing his request and getting it to the finish line prior to budget approval in March. “I’m going to do something I rarely do and that’s increase taxation.”
Gibbons noted that for some reason, the Eagle Bay Community Association has been bearing the brunt of the criticism for the continued delays and asked that residents be made aware of the project’s “achievable”completion once a solid opening date could be set.
“I don’t want to miss another opening date.”
