Creating Cordata Park
Development centers wetland preservation while creating a community space.
Irrigation Flags plotting points for crews later and pipes protecting new sapling. // Matthew Price
June 12, 2023
Story by Aditi Pauls
Though it’s an overcast day, there are still plenty of people and families out at Cordata Park. People of all ages are milling around the playground while others are spread out over a large area, walking or biking on trails further north. The looping pathways, sprawled across the reeds and sedge grass, make for an easy and scenic walk.
Cordata Park is home to playgrounds, picnic areas, trails, landscape planting and more. A large focus of the upcoming construction, beginning in June, is preserving the surrounding wetland, which most of the park is built on. The unique terrain conflicts with traditional expectations of a park — rolling hills, uniform grass and large open spaces — but considerable thought went into the earliest stages of planning.
“Encumbered” land refers to areas where the actual wetland or wetland buffers are. Those areas of land help to naturally filter water and stop pollution from entering local water systems. Building directly over these buffers can damage the ecosystem, so the developers employed mitigation strategies and carefully monitored the area to determine how to design the park without disrupting the natural wetland.
Most of the park features are built on unencumbered ground. The overall design is built around the natural shape of the land.
In some areas, park design does impact wetland buffer areas. In those cases, the developers created new patches of wetland as close to the original site as they could, according to lead architect Jonathan Schilk. They created depressions, installed types of slow-draining soil and created conditions where wetland species like sedge, rush and willows can thrive.
In other areas of the park, it was up to the developers to enhance pre-existing wetland buffers. The biggest factor in an effective wetland buffer is vegetation in the area. In this case, that meant removing invasive grasses like reed canary grass and replacing them with native Puget Sound plants such as bigleaf maples, native hawthorns and crab apples.
A quiet moment at Cordata Park before the start of a birthday party. // Matthew Price
“We went through a lot of iterations of plan revisions, trying to rearrange the various site features the site uses to minimize impacts to the wetlands,” said Schilk. “Which kind of speaks to why the park is developed the way it is.”
This can most clearly be seen in the looping trails connecting the two areas of playgrounds, parking lots and other park features. The trails follow patterns of unencumbered land, carefully weaving around the wetland areas so that parkgoers can appreciate the wetland ecology from a distance that keeps it safe.
This careful consideration of environmental impact was exactly what the people who live in Cordata – the ones who voted for the park and had input into its design – wanted. The designers sought extensive community feedback and held many town hall meetings where Cordata citizens were able to suggest park features like a spray park and a pump track.
Additional outreach included information posted to the project page, physical notices mailed out and several press releases.
Two parkgoers, Luke and Lily DeLatour, visited Cordata Park for the first time and were pleasantly surprised by the pump track and parkour areas.
“It’s nice to see the extra features for the families and kids,” Luke DeLatour said with a smile on his face. “It’s nice to see people out enjoying [the park].”
Accessibility in outdoor recreation areas remains an issue for those with disabilities of all kinds, but people like Kristi Valera, a member of the park’s Inclusion Board, are working to make sure that Cordata Park is a place everyone can enjoy.
“It was really rewarding … to be able to spread the awareness of not just acceptance but acknowledgment, that every child should be allowed to play at a park, even if there’s just one thing they can do,” said Valera as she watched her children play on the jungle gym.
To her, it’s crucial that there be something for everyone. Valera appreciates the variety of different things the park offers, pointing out a play structure that was specifically designed to rock back and forth while supporting a wheelchair.
The estimated area of estuary to be developed south of the current park. // Matthew Price
“The master plan itself had at least three public meetings. And then there was the separate neighborhood meeting engagements that we did, then there was park committees,” Schilk said. “It’s just making sure that the taxpayers know how their tax dollars are being spent and what it’s being spent on.”
Among the many people in attendance at the initial public meetings was Julianne Guy, founding member of the Cordata Neighborhood Association. She had been campaigning for a park in the area since 2003.
When Guy first moved from Alaska to Bellingham in 2003, there were many parks and green spaces south of Meridian – Lake Padden, Whatcom Falls and Boulevard Park remain popular attractions for people all around town. But north of Meridian, where she lived, there was nothing aside from a gully that was almost fully forested and largely inaccessible because of a locked gate.
By establishing a park in the area, the City of Bellingham has provided the residents of Cordata with what they’ve been pushing for. The presence of green spaces remains largely emphasized; there is now an established community garden where neighborhood residents can rent a plot of land and grow whatever vegetables and herbs they’d like.
Studies have shown that spaces like parks, nature reserves or wilderness environments have been linked to better mental health. People who move from areas with less green space to areas with more of it report significantly better mental health within just three years.
Cordata Park remains an example of what a concentrated community effort as well as adaptive park design can do: create a space where people can reap the benefits of being in nature without destroying the already existing landscape to do it.
Aditi Pauls is a junior at Western studying environmental science. They enjoy exploring the preservation and creation of natural spaces, as well as the connections people make with the land they live on.
Matthew Price is an environmental studies student whose photography examines the interconnected relationships of nature and engineering.