Hoover to hold final public meeting for Star Lake upgrades

A plan to upgrade Star Lake in Hoover’s Green Valley community is back in motion now that the City Council approved tax increases to bolster city revenues.

The city is holding a final public involvement meeting at Green Valley Baptist Church from 6 to 8 p.m. this Tuesday, Oct. 2. It’s a come-and-go format with no formal presentation. People will be able to review plans and ask questions on their own time.

An initial public involvement meeting was held in July 2017, during which residents were shown potential projects that could be part of the upgrade and asked to provide feedback.

Now, city officials want to share revisions that have been made in the plan, taking into consideration the amount of money available and the feedback given by residents about what parts of the upgrade project are most important to them, City Administrator Allan Rice said.

The 2018 budget that was approved by the City Council included about $350,000 for the Star Lake upgrade, said Tim Westhoven, the city’s chief operations officer. However, the upgrades got delayed along with some other capital projects due to concerns about city revenues, Rice said. Now that the revenue issue has been resolved, city officials are ready to proceed with the upgrades, he said.

The revised plans still include creating one-way traffic on the roads circling the lake, Westhoven said. That should be safer and also allow some room to widen the sidewalk around the lake, he said. The current sidewalk is about 5-6 feet wide, and the proposed sidewalk will be 10 feet wide, Westhoven said.

City officials also propose to increase the number of parking spaces from 12 to 36. Some earlier versions of the plan included even more parking spaces, but residents expressed concerns about having too much parking, so planners pulled out some of the proposed parallel parking spaces along the roads around the lake, Westhoven said.

The revised plans also include additional landscaping, some benches and a paved plaza area with tables to facilitate neighborhood gatherings.

One popular feature that is not included in the revised plan is a water quality feature that would have trapped some of the sediment that flows into the lake and kept it from spreading too far, Westhoven said. There just wasn’t enough money in the budget to include that, but city officials hope to be able to do that as a later phase, he said.

Other projects being reserved for a later phase are the construction of an oval-shaped pier and installation of light poles. There also was not money to create a specific area for food trucks with electrical hookups, Westhoven said.

City officials hope to complete designs for the Star Lake upgrade and put the project out for bid in early 2019 and begin construction in the spring, he said.