If you wanted a free loaner life jacket from the box at Chism Beach Park this summer, the program ended on Labor Day. The city's partnership with the drowning-prevention group No More Under kept loaner life jackets stocked at five different Lake Washington beach parks all summer, including Chism, and the program ran through Labor Day. Labor Day in 2026 fell on September 7, which means the free-loaner season for one of West Bellevue's two swimming beaches quietly ended then, whether or not anyone marked it on a calendar.

That small, practical detail is a decent stand-in for the bigger story in this neighborhood right now. Everyone who follows Bellevue parks news has heard about the Meydenbauer Bay Park expansion, the renderings of a Gateway Plaza, the Canopy Walk, the removal of the apartment buildings at Main Street and 100th Avenue. It is the project with the design consultant, the community webinars, and the recurring headlines. But construction on that expansion is not scheduled to start until 2029. The park most West Bellevue residents actually walk to on a Tuesday evening, Chism Beach Park, has completed its invasive-plant removal project, while the cedar benches remain funded but pending, and almost nobody outside the neighborhood noticed.

The park with the renderings isn't moving yet

The Bellevue City Council voted unanimously on June 4, 2025 to advance Meydenbauer Bay Park's Phase 2 expansion into architectural and engineering design. That is a real step, but it is a design step, not a shovel-in-ground one. A city update from January 2026 put the design and permitting phase at roughly three years, with construction currently expected to begin in late 2029. The scope is genuinely significant when it does arrive: the apartment buildings at the corner of Main Street and 100th Avenue come down to open a direct sightline from downtown to the water, a new Gateway Plaza anchors the western end of Bellevue's Grand Connection corridor, and an accessible, gently sloped Canopy Walk carries pedestrians down toward the beach.

None of that changes what the park looks like this September, or next September. Phase 1, the pier, the expanded beach, the play area, and the kayak launch, opened in 2019 and is still the park you'll find today. Phase 2 is a plan on a very long runway, and treating it as this year's neighborhood news gets the timeline backward.

The other beach has already seen some changes

Chism Beach Park sits a few minutes south, tucked into the residential streets off Bellevue Way, and it does not come with a design consultant or a webinar series. It gets funded through Bellevue's Neighborhood Enhancement Program instead, a smaller, resident-driven capital program that rotates through the city's fourteen neighborhood areas over a seven-year cycle. West Bellevue residents returned 362 ballots to direct the neighborhood's $294,000 allotment for this cycle, and two of the four projects they chose landed right at Chism.

The first is straightforward and already complete: crews cleared English ivy, Himalayan blackberry, English holly, and English laurel from the forested slope above the beach, then replanted the cleared ground with native trees and shrubs suited to the site. The city closed that project out in fall 2025. If you have walked the wooded path at Chism recently and noticed the understory looks less choked and more open than it did a year or two ago, that is why.

The second is smaller but changes how the park gets used day to day. Three new cedar benches, matching the roughly six-foot length of the ones already installed along the pathways, were part of the same ballot round. The city has not published a firm completion date for that one the way it did for the invasive removal, but the funding is committed and the work sits alongside a project that already finished, not years out on a design timeline. Chism's paths wind through a residential neighborhood with a real hill between the beach and the nearest streets, and a bench every so often changes who is comfortable making the walk down and back.

Here is how the two parks actually compare on timing right now:

The pattern is not subtle once it is laid out. The least-publicized Chism project, invasive-plant removal, is finished, while the cedar benches are still pending. The project with the most public attention is still years from breaking ground.

The lighting project that connects the beach to the train

The same round of West Bellevue neighborhood funding also covers something that has nothing to do with the beach directly but everything to do with how residents move around this part of the neighborhood after dark. New street and stair lighting is planned between 108th Avenue SE and the South Bellevue Light Rail Station, covering the stretch of SE 28th Street between 108th and 110th, SE 28th Place east of 110th, and the stair connection running from the 11400 block of SE 28th Place to the 2800 block of 112th Avenue SE. The scope includes up to two new LED streetlights on existing utility poles, one new LED streetlight on a newly installed pole, and up to five pedestrian-scale lights along the stairs themselves. The city's estimated completion is late 2026, so this is a project to watch for over the next few months rather than one that has already landed.

It matters for a reason that has nothing to do with novelty. The city's own neighborhood planning materials note that this corner of West Bellevue absorbed significant impacts from East Link light rail construction and King County Metro sewer infrastructure upgrades, and the lighting project is one of the improvements residents chose to fund once that construction wound down. For anyone who walks or bikes down to the South Bellevue station rather than driving, this is the kind of infrastructure change that shows up in daily habits well before it shows up in any headline.

What Labor Day actually marks here

Back to the life jackets, because the timing is worth spelling out rather than treating as trivia. The City of Bellevue held its first Open Water Safety Day on June 27, 2026 at Meydenbauer Bay Park, an event built around drowning prevention, life jacket fitting, and hands-on demonstrations from partners including Best Kayak and the King County Sheriff's Office Marine Rescue Dive Unit. That event kicked off a summer-long loaner program, run with No More Under, that stocked free life jackets at:

• Meydenbauer Bay Park
• Chism Beach Park
• Clyde Beach Park
• Enatai Beach Park
• Newcastle Beach Park
• The SE 40th Street boat launch

The program ran through Labor Day. Because Labor Day fell unusually late relative to some years—on September 7 in 2026—the loaner season effectively ran a few extra days longer than it would have in a year when the holiday landed at the start of the month. It is a minor calendar quirk, but it is the kind of detail that only shows up if you are actually tracking what happens at this specific stretch of shoreline rather than reading a generic description of Lake Washington beach access.

Two timelines, one neighborhood

None of this argues that the Meydenbauer expansion doesn't matter. When it eventually breaks ground, it will change how downtown Bellevue connects to its own waterfront in a way Chism Beach Park never will. But if you live in West Bellevue and want to know what is actually different about your neighborhood's beach access this year, the honest answer sits with the smaller park, the finished invasive removal, the funded and pending cedar benches, and a lighting project inching toward completion by winter, not with the plaza still on the drawing board.

If you're weighing a move within this stretch of the Eastside, or wondering what a specific West Bellevue address is actually worth given how the neighborhood keeps evolving block by block, The Gray Team tracks these details as part of how we advise clients on waterfront and near-waterfront property here. Request a confidential valuation and private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.