This Friday, Ada County’s Park at Expo Idaho opens to the public for the first time. It’s the new, nearly 50-acre park with natural wetlands, an Olympic-class skate park and playgrounds, too.
"The job is 99.9% complete," said Ada County Senior Project Manager Josh Brown. "It's just letting plants grow."
Brown is my guide across some of the park’s 3.4 miles of path, as crews work on finishing touches in different areas of the site. Brown explains nearly a million plantings and plugs, starter plants, went into the ground by hand.
"When we open, it's going to be finished, but it's the worst it's ever going to look," Brown said. "Every year the plants are going to get bigger, everything gets more established, the wildlife moves in and it'll look better and better every year."
There’s only about one-third of an acre of turf grass in the entire park; other foliage is native species. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required planners to prioritize flood capacity from the Boise River while reestablishing a wetland. Ecological uplift, Brown said.
"All of that was taken into consideration when we were designing these wetlands, and with that being said, we had to design everything else around [the requirement]."
Brown said they engaged the Army Corps early and often in the planning process to ensure they were meeting those requirements.
A few minutes into our walk, we met the architect team from Port Urbanism. They’re based in Chicago and Philadelphia and visit Boise about once a month. Nick Jabs is the landscape architect and he called the project a "one-of-one."
"Five years sounds like a lot, but to go from nothing to this in that amount of time is pretty remarkable," Jabs said.
Brown called the five-year timeline for a project of this scale "unprecedented" in his 24-year career. The pace was primarily tied to the park’s funding; $42 million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act money had to be spent by the end of this year, or returned to the federal government. Both Brown and the architects complimented each other’s attention to detail during the project, but Brown said the project’s speed required extra diligence.
"We didn't always feel like good clients," he explained. "We had to have a a closed door meeting with our stakeholder group without anyone else in the room, and really a hard conversation about not being the reason this doesn't happen."
Brown said they’ve succeeded in avoiding internal stumbles, and they’ve stayed under budget, even with a few surprises - like water pipes in unexpected places and their new neighbors as of last year, when Boise Pro Soccer moved into the Expo site.
"Trucking, growing plants, building swings, building steel structures, building bridges," he said. "That stuff has to be carefully coordinated, and we haven't been perfect but we feel like success is at hand. We're there."
The county had previously announced it hoped to open the park this past summer. That was an aspirational deadline, Brown said, set before they knew Boise Pro Soccer would move in on part of the property.
Internally, they targeted late fall with a possibility of opening earlier this fall, but Brown said they could have done a better job managing expectations around the opening date.
As we arrive at the skate park, which anchors the park's northwest corner, concrete crews are still working. The crew is specialized for this work, and has their own bikes and skateboards to test out features as they go.
"We have entry-level skating all the way up to Olympic level skating," Brown said. "There are several features within this park that were lifted straight out of the Olympics."
Nearby, a unique public bathroom was made with 750,000 pounds of concrete. The building's walkway is fully skatable, with a modernist look and lighting underneath, which at night almost makes the building appear to float.
Across the park, there are nods to the site’s history as a horse racing venue, from railings like you’d see at a horse track to the refurbished old watchtower and another bathroom and utility structure meant to evoke the look of a horse barn. It's elevated, with gathering space underneath, and natural air conditioning.
"Underneath this long portion where the picnic tables are, we have skylights that create vortices. They're fanless fans," Brown said. "The wind catches and uplift happens inside the pavilion to create a cooling effect."
Even on a sunny mid-fall day with a slight breeze, I could feel the air moving up the vortices and a noticeable temperature difference. That structure also funnels rainwater into a waterfall off one side for a unique experience in inclement weather conditions.
Paying homage to the horse track extends to the park’s playground, with the largest public swing set west of the Mississippi. Most swing sets are built on an A-frame, but this one is designed like a horse track railing, with a single post.
That’s where engineer David Fulton, Principal of Boise’s Plan North Engineers, comes in.
"Berliner, the playground equipment manufacturer, hadn't done one like this before. So it was a pretty close collaboration between them and us."
Fulton said the foundation under each pole weighs about as much as five large pickup trucks. There were unique structural elements across the park, from the concrete bathroom structure at the skate park to the playground's climbing structures and slides, what anyone might expect at a public park, but they feel bigger. The tallest measures 36 feet, with a corkscrew slide.
"Amongst all of these cool playground features, we have boulders, we have big wood scrambles everywhere. And this isn't designed just for kids," Brown explained. "So when you come out here, climb up and down all of this with your kids, get on it, play, have fun. This is nature play!"
As we walk a gravel trail into the lowlands of the park, Brown, a self-proclaimed bird enthusiast, stops to point out some of the species already making homes in the restored wetland
"I've felt very lucky to be involved day one and to basically stand up for birds and create habitat."
We hear honks from Canada Geese and chirps from multiple other birds, too.
"You've heard it the entire time we're here," he said. "They're everywhere, all by design."
And a new sight stops him mid-sentence.
"I cannot take my eyes off that kestrel over there. He's going in and out of that tree over there, do you see him? He's feeding, he's hunting. That's exciting! That's the first one I've seen, this is huge. And that's a kingfisher chasing him, he's like, 'you're in my feeding zone, dude. Get out of here!'"
Brown excitedly lists off species he's seen: ducks of course, but also sandpipers, killdeer, great heron, an egret they named Gary.
"You're witnessing ecological uplift, right? We have fish in the streams. We have frogs. We found salamanders, and now we know kestrels are coming to feed on it."
There is natural beaver habitat, too, which Brown said his teams may have to monitor in order to keep water moving through the marsh and wetland.
There’s so much to see in the park’s natural areas, which will continue to grow in the years to come, but park visitors do need to stick to marked paths
"We have little unique opportunities where you can interact, where you're crossing the streams. But yeah, let the let the wildlife be wild. Bring your camera with a long lens, get some good pictures, but don't get down in their space," Brown advises.
Friday’s ribbon cutting will happen at 10 a.m. on the plaza, near the greenbelt and bridge over Plantation Island. That’s the spot where they can program events at the park, with food trucks, live music and more.
Brown says he’s excited to see the community finally enjoying the park he’s watched grow from day one, a generational project that will always look just a little different than the day before.
“It’ll grow with you, by design. That’s what we wanted.”
