Preparing for Curtin Creek Community Park

The project site is part of a 39-acre property that the city of Vancouver and Clark County jointly purchased in 1999. The roughly rectangular parcel extends east from Northeast 72nd Avenue and includes part of the Gaddis Wetland area around Curtin Creek. Vancouver wanted part of the site for a new fire station, and the county intended to use the remainder for a community park.

The park is expected to see high traffic due to the demand for athletic facilities and the constant growth of Clark County’s population, Reed said. In particular, the area surrounding the park is expected to see hundreds of new homes in the coming years. The current closest park with athletic facilities, Luke Jensen Sports Park, is 3 miles away.

The fire station takes up 5.7 acres at the western end of the site, along Northeast 72nd Avenue. The remaining land is divided into two areas: a 16-acre western half that will be developed as Curtin Creek Community Park, and a 17-acre eastern half that will remain a natural area.

In the long run, Sawyer said, the county could consider building some sort of access to the eastern half of the park, such as a boardwalk through the Curtin Creek area, but development restrictions in the Gaddis Wetland area would make that part of the project much more complicated, so county staff opted to split the land in half and focus on developing only the western half first.

The station was completed in 2006, but the park project was delayed when the 2008 recession forced the county to shelve several projects, according to Clark County Public Works capital project manager Scott Sawyer. The timeline was further stretched by the 2013 decision to split Vancouver-Clark Parks & Recreation up into separate city and county parks departments.

Park configuration

County staff now have the time to move forward on the project in earnest, although development of the park is still in the early stages. Community parks typically include features like field areas, trails, picnic shelters and restrooms, but county staff want to use public input to guide the specific features of Curtin Creek Park.

“No decisions have been made yet regarding what’s in the park,” Sawyer said. “The only thing I know is there is likely going to be parking.”

The site is intended to serve residents in a 3-mile radius at minimum, Sawyer said, so it will need to be designed with the expectation that most users will drive to it. The site would likely be accessed from 72nd Ave, with a parking lot branching off from a driveway that leads to the fire station’s rear lot.

The county gathered feedback from more than 600 respondents in an online survey in the fall and held a public open house Nov. 13, which drew about 100 people. Staff have also been meeting with nearby stakeholders like schools and sports clubs, Sawyer said, to get a better sense of how they would use the park.

Visitors were asked to give feedback on their favorite features from three mock-up designs showing different possible configurations. None of the mock-ups were final designs, Sawyer said — they were just intended to help the respondents visualize what the park might look like.

“There was a large desire for sports fields,” Sawyer said.

Several attendees expressed support for multi-purpose sports fields that can be configured for different sports, Sawyer said, including less-common sports like rugby. There were also requests for features such as trails, a dog park, a BMX track and pickleball courts.

Parks staff have spent the past month analyzing the public feedback and are now in the process of presenting the results to parks administrators and members of the parks advisory board, Sawyer said. The next step is for engineers to begin running cost estimates on various project components to help narrow down the vision for the park.

The project’s timeline calls for a master plan to be finished by the end of the year, with design and engineering work continuing through January 2021. Construction is targeted to start in the summer of 2021 and will hopefully take about nine months, Sawyer said, with the goal of having the park open by the summer of 2022.