OAKLAND — The next stage of the city’s Lake Merritt Master Plan project is set to get under way this spring, bringing improved pedestrian access along Grand Avenue outside Children’s Fairyland.

If all goes as planned, the work will be done by fall.

The project has been in the planning stages for years. With the City Council’s endorsement Jan. 17 of the proposed $2 million contract with local firm McGuire and Hester, work can finally begin.

“It’s been a long time coming. We’re excited to begin the project this spring,” project manager Ali Schwarz said in an interview.

In addition to improved access, including Americans With Disabilities Act compliant pathways to Fairyland, Lakeside Park and the Garden Center, there will be a new bus loading zone and shelter, improved streetlights and traffic signals, landscaping, repaving and storm water treatment.

The crosswalk at the corner of Grand and Bellevue avenues leading into Lakeside Park will become shorter with new bulb-outs on either side of Bellevue.

Down Bellevue at the Garden Center past the lawn bowling club, the project includes public art commissioned from blacksmith Shawn Lovell. She was an Oakland resident when her proposal was selected in 2010 and has since moved to Alameda.

She is making two sets of weatherized wrought-iron gates for the Garden Center, designed with a combination of branch forms and depictions of garden tools, said Kristen Zaremba of the city’s public art program. The gates will cost $86,000.

The project will be paid for with $828,000 in federal funds remaining from the 12th Street Reconstruction Project already earmarked for Lake Merritt improvements, $700,000 from Measure DD, $360,000 from Alameda County’s 2008 Measure WW and $150,000 from Measure B, a half-cent county sales tax passed in 2000.

Besides doing the work to revitalize Latham Square at Broadway and Telegraph Avenue that was completed last year, McGuire and Hester has also been the lead contractor in the 12th Street Project that included building a new bridge at the south end of Lake Merritt.

The company also restored wetlands that opened the tidal slough to the bay and did landscaping work and improved pedestrian access along that part of the lake and to Laney College.

McGuire and Hester is a local, employee-owned company that had donated the construction work for Fairlyland’s “Jack and Jill Hill,” an artificial turf-covered mound in the theme park’s zoo, where children slide down the slope on cardboard sleds.

It was the first new feature there in four years, according to Fairyland Executive Director C.J. Hirshfield, who wrote that since the hill opened in 2012, it’s “never been without kids on it for more than a minute.”

Also for the new project, the city is contracting with Bottomley Associates for $150,000 worth of landscape architectural work expected to save on water costs through the use of drought-tolerant native plants.

Subcontractors on the project include Oakland’s Gallagher & Burns and Central Concrete for asphalt and concrete, respectively, and S&B Trucking, which have $210,000 worth of work cut out for them. The remaining six subcontractors are all Bay Area businesses.

Contact Mark Hedin at 501-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.