Fact finding continues for waterfront park

Several community leaders met last week with representatives from the National Park Service on September 14 to continue planning a potential park on the site of the former sewage lagoons in Cathlamet.

Prior to the meeting, the group from NPS met with sixth and eighth grade students in order to get a feel for what the local youth might want in a park.

According to Brianna Truden of NPS, the students' complaints about community parks centered on unsanitary bathrooms, distance, neglected basketball hoops and tennis courts, and an undeveloped and unchallenging skate park.

What did they want? Paths, recycling, and perhaps a place to watch movies.

“It was good to see their perspective,” Truden said.

One teacher was volunteered to make sure all the students at J.A. Wendt elementary school and John C. Thomas middle school took the survey.

Rex Ziak, who wanted to see some kinetic wind sculptures at the park, shared more of his ideas that he hoped would give local kids an opportunity to get involved at the park.

“You’ve got something that other communities don’t,” Dan Miller of NPS pointed out. “The riverfront, the history, the fishing, the recreational opportunities. I think developing your waterfront is an excellent start to creating a community that has a great quality of life.”

Miller discussed the process, which included the survey, a recreational site survey, and a physical site survey.

The recreational site survey is a list of all the elements of all the parks in the area. Miller gave an example.

“We’ve got football fields here, here and here,” he said of an imaginary map. “Maybe Cathlamet doesn’t need a football field at the waterfront.”

Maps will be used for the physical site survey, to look at the lay of the land.

The next step will be a workshop, which was scheduled for November 19th and should take most of the day. It will be followed by an open house that will be open to the entire community.

According the Miller the workshop will pair landscape architects with community members who have been invested in this project, as well as other “key stakeholders and community members.” The architects will use their skills to illustrate what their particular group is requesting.

Each architect will be working on one of three alternatives for the park. One will be more natural, the second will be more developed and the third alternative will be a hybrid of the two.

“It’s always amazing to me to go through one of these workshops and see how quickly you can illustrate different ideas and how hard it is to envision those ideas without visuals,” Miller said.

During the open house, the community will be welcome to give feedback on the three designs created that day.

After the open house, it will be another four to six months before the plan design is completed.