Crews readying for next Atlas park stage

COEUR d’ALENE — Construction crews are wrapping up the most recent stage of the Atlas Waterfront Park and are preparing, one way or another, to build its infrastructure.

“The Atlas Waterfront project is on schedule and starting to take shape,” said Tony Berns, executive director of ignite cda, Coeur d’Alene’s urban renewal agency.

He said the next phase of the project will be to install and construct infrastructure elements.

That next phase will focus on utilities and roads along the western side of the park-to-be. Officials say crews are still on time, though the coronavirus could change that.

“A lot has been accomplished already,” City Attorney Michael Gridley said during the April 7 City Council meeting after seeing the site for himself, “and it’s really cool. But there’s still a lot of earth that they’re trying to recycle.”

That earth — once dubbed “Mount Hink” but now officially dubbed “Atlas Bluff” — has so far been the lone noteworthy hold-up, and only a paperwork hold-up to date. Once thought of as unusable, LaRiviere Construction now deems the soil at least partly salvageable.

That work stepped outside the bounds of the original contract, which Councilmember Kiki Miller said was not uncommon after big projects. But ignite cda requested the city assign the contract to the urban renewal agency for management, which led Mayor Steve Widmyer and the council to table the matter until the April 21 council meeting, where they’ll hear a presentation on the matter from ignite leadership.

“If there’s not dramatic amounts of work going on there, it seems like there wouldn’t be a grave harm that we take a look at what the actual changes of these details and dollar amounts might be,” Miller said.

The city purchased the Atlas Mill site in 2018 for $7.8 million. Ignite cda is funding construction of the park.