The city of Maple Valley is currently working on plans to replace the Lake Wilderness Dock, according to Parks and Recreation Director Greg Brown.
The decision was made at the Dec. 5 meeting as the result of a survey by an engineering firm was presented to the council.
In August, the city contracted Reid Middleton, an engineering firm, to conduct a survey of the dock’s condition. In its final report, Middleton concluded that various sections of the dock, including the floats and wooden piles, are in need of repair or replacement.
In the meantime, however, Brown stated the dock is currently safe to use.
“The dock is in a state of disrepair,” he said. “But it’s not in an unsafe condition. It still floats. It’s not in any danger of disconnecting from it safety points. That’s why we hired the engineering corps. They said, ‘We recommend you replace it sooner or later. By the time you get through the permitting and design and constructing, you should just start the process now.’”
Middleton presented two possibilities for the city: Repair the existing dock by reusing sections which are still functional or replace the floats entirely in kind. In kind means that only necessary parts would be replaced and no additional improvements or additions would be included in the project.
The City Council chose to go with second option of replacing the floats in-kind, which is estimated to cost $515,000.
It is a choice which both Middleton and Brown have recommended due to its cost effectiveness over the long term.
“I would agree with what the Council did,” Brown said. “The engineers came back and said if you want to reuse the floats, the expected life span will only be 10-15 years. The floats are already 40 years old. They said, “Yeah, they’ll last a little longer. The cost benefit analysis showed it (replace in kind) is much more cost efficient. If you replace the floats now…you’ll get 40 years or more of life in the floats if you replace them all now. If you look at the number of years and divide it by the costs of the project, it is much more cost efficient.”
Among the proposals was the addition of a new boat rental pier which had originally been include in the city’s 2007 park master plan for Lake Wilderness Park. With a price tag of $140,000, however, the City Council decided to have it included as an alternative when they put the project up for a contracting bid.
Brown explained that this would allow them to either add the pier into the final project or remove it based on the winning bid.
“It’s a pretty typical process for a construction project,” he said. “When you don’t know if you can afford it, you can have individual items priced separately. Normally this would be a lump sum bid. Tearing off a piece of this rental boat pier gives you a separate price for that. We can include it if the bids come in lower than we anticipate. If the bids don’t come in as anticipated and the Council doesn’t want to throw any more money at it we’ll just keep it at number 2 (replace in-kind).”
The project was not originally included in the 2012 city budget and was added at the Dec. 5, according to Brown.
“That was the reason we talked about it Monday night, because the Council needed to know so they could adjust the budget,” he said. “At that point in time we said the total project would be around $400,000. We would have been under that amount if the council had decided to go with alternative one, which means they would have reused the old floats.”
Brown said the contract with Middleton will need to be amended to include the remaining work, as well as the permitting and design process, which is expected to take six to eight months months. The city hopes to have a bid in early September and have the dock repairs completed by the end of next year.
