McEuen cost: $23-39M

COEUR d'ALENE - Estimates are in.

The price tag to redevelop McEuen Field could fall somewhere between $23 and $39 million, the conceptual designers announced Thursday.

The range in costs depends on how many of the amenities are actually included should the specifics of the final plan be nailed down and sent out to bid.

Those will be the next steps, with another public meeting to be scheduled along the way, but Thursday's workshop put quantifiable figures to what had been a widely-speculated unknown since the plan's public unveiling in December.

"I'm very pleased with the numbers," said Mayor Sandi Bloem, following the workshop at Parkside Towers. "It doesn't mean I think we can just go out and spend $25, $30 million right now. But I think if we're talking about a long-term vision - and the partners we can put together during the first phase and so forth - there really is an opportunity here."

A bulk of the project is estimated to cost between $23 to $27.9 million.

That package would get nearly every itemized amenity - from a majority of the parking garage to the dog park - but leaves out the lowest level of the parking garage, as well as the cost of replacing displaced facilities.

Moving the American Legion baseball field temporarily to Coeur d'Alene High School and building the roughly $2.6 million Silver Beach boat launch pushes the range to between $26 and $30 million.

The bottom level of the parking garage - the Centennial Trail level - would cost between $5.5 and $6.4 million.

And a replacement baseball stadium - the Spokane RiverHawks baseball club has expressed interest in relocating to Coeur d'Alene - would cost $2 million on the north side of Cherry Hill park.

That facility and those partnerships are in the preliminary stage, said Doug Eastwood, parks director. It does not include acquiring the land for it currently owned by the Coeur d'Alene Eagles.

All packaged together, it brings the high end toward $39 million.

"This is the vision," said Dick Stauffer, Team McEuen planner, on the conceptual design now having estimates attached.

Next up for officials and designers will be to plan another public meeting to focus on which vision from the list of options would be the best option to put before the City Council.

The public would have opportunity to offer input at those yet-to-be-determined meetings.

Team McEuen calculated a number of factors, including quantity takeoffs, recently bid projects with similar components, and vendor supplied costs for specialty items such as docks and skate parks.

It also contracted Mark Aden, president of DCI Engineers in Spokane, to help calculate the below-surface parking structure. Added to the estimates was 15 percent as contingency - basically 15 percent extra to account for the unknown, as well as design fees and administrative costs, Stauffer said.

Stauffer said there wasn't a conflict of interest that the conceptual designers were the ones who calculated the estimated costs, as there wouldn't be incentive to under-shoot the prices in favor of short-term public approval.

"You just don't intentionally estimate low, because you would just screw up the whole process," he said. "Even if there was political motivations, you wouldn't do it because if the prices were to come in much higher, then the wheels would fall off" moving the project forward.

Bloem agreed.

"There's no reason not to trust their expertise," she said, adding that if the project did come in much higher than Thursday's figures, "we would have to reassess" it on the whole.

Around 70 people attended the workshop.

Some questioned whether the estimates would come in at those numbers.

"I think the estimates are low," said Rita Sims-Snyder, who added she spoke to local and a Seattle-based designer who estimated close to $50 million for the project. She didn't disclose those designers.

"It's going to come in higher," she said. "Hardly ever does a project of this size come in under."

Former City Council candidate Dan Gookin did not attend the workshop but had posted online at one point that the parking structure - based on prices he researched from the High Construction Company website and other reports - could cost up to $82 million.

Thursday he said his tally wasn't the concrete number, but the estimated parking structure now, between $7 and $8.3 million without the bottom level, seemed "overly optimistic."

"That's not realistic to what I read elsewhere," he said of his estimate. "They could know something I don't know, but that's what I saw doing my research."

Others, both at the workshop and at a pro-McEuen Field project rally at the downtown park Thursday afternoon, were impressed with the project, and the estimated price.

"I like the idea of the expansion for the sake of the next generation," said Tony Marsters, who attended the rally with his 15-month-old daughter. Around 40 other people showed up. "If you're not looking for progress, you're going backwards the whole time."

Hans Manbeck, who attended the workshop, said the estimated costs seemed low enough to make the project a reality.

"In some ways it gets you like a dog salivating to where it's like you wish it was done already," he said.

More decisions need to happen.

One possibility is to not do the bottom level of parking and eventually put more parking north of Sherman Avenue on property Lake City Development Corp., the city's urban renewal agency, owns.

Once a more nailed-down cost is decided, the city can more actively identify possible funding partnerships, including grants, LCDC, and private donations.

LCDC, meanwhile, will learn its future revenue projections inside the Lake District, the urban renewal boundary in which McEuen Field sits, on Wednesday.

Should the park be built out, Eastwood estimated it would cost $24,000 more in maintenance and operation costs for the park. Those costs could be covered by expected revenues the park could generate in certain amenity reservation and usage fees. If they aren't, he said, it wouldn't be detrimental to the parks department's roughly $1.6 million operating budget.

Also, the costs could dip a little, Bloem said, since the city does have certain dedicated fees that would have to be allocated to public portions of the park area regardless of whether anything is done to the park. Those include utility upgrades and road improvement funds set aside to improve Front Avenue since it needs work with or without a park upgrade.

The costs were itemized, so pieces could be stripped one by one as the project moves along should it get that far. The project would likely be in two phases, with the first phase, mostly concentrating on the Front Avenue, parking, grand plaza, and Fourth Street portion. More itemized amenities would follow in the second. Team McEuen estimated at previous meetings construction could be an 18-month process.