City awards bid for Talbot Hill Reservoir Park project

The Renton City Council approved a budget increase of $162,000 for improvements to the Talbot Hill Reservoir Park to afford the lowest bidder for the construction.

At the Jan. 13 meeting, the council awarded the construction contract to Active Construction Inc., which was the lowest responsive bidder of the seven bids received, for the amount of $875,875, including sales tax. The project is partially funded by a $350,000 State RCO (Recreation and Conservation Office) Youth Athletic Facilities grant.

The $162,000 difference in costs and the planned budget amount for the Parks and Recreation Department will be included in the Q1 2025 budget adjustment. The Parks and Recreation Department is working with the Finance Department to identify appropriate funding sources, which may include Park Impact Fees or funding from deferred projects.

Talbot Hill Reservoir Park is located at 710 S. 19th St.

“This is a water reservoir and a water utility site first and a park second,” Renton Capital Projects Manager Betsy Severtsen said. “So there’s some complexity to the project compared to the more typical park renovation projects.”

The project’s scope includes sports court upgrades, a new picnic shelter, parking lot improvements, site furnishings, landscape plantings, and ADA improvements including a pathway connecting all site features, a new pedestrian bridge, and an ADA parking stall.

“We started more detailed site assessment and design of this project early in 2024. Through that project we worked with professional engineers and landscape architects. There was a little bit more scope added to the project,” Severtsen said. “We went out to the site and realized there’s some accessibility compliance issues.”

Severtson said she thinks renovating parks helps encourage nearby residents to use the parks for their recreation needs.

“We saw with the pandemic in particular how important outdoor recreation is for folks’ physical and mental well-being,” Severtson said. “This park gets a lot of passive good use from dog walkers, walkers and folks coming out to hit the ball around a little bit, but we are hoping to improve things so more people are interested in coming out to Talbot Hill Reservoir Park.”

Severtson said regular renovations for the parks also will help save money in the long run.

“We just have to keep up with renovations so that things don’t degrade so much that we can’t replace them with much, much larger budgets or much bigger design changes or modifications,” Severtson said.

Severtsen said the chosen company, Active Construction Inc., has done work in Renton previously, including the Philip Arnold Park a few years ago.

Construction on the project is expected to begin in early spring 2025 and be completed by June 2025.

“We’re very much hoping that the project will be complete before the Memorial Day weekend, but the big caveat is if we have unseasonably cold and/or wet weather, that affects their ability to do the work,” Severtsen said. “The major complexity on this site is making sure everything works well with the water utility itself but we expect that the design has taken that into account.”