It was the evening of Thursday, April 9, 2009, and the scores of chairs set up inside the large conference room at North Idaho College were mostly empty.

There were a few representatives from the local colleges and Jobs Plus sitting in seats, one media outlet in the back, and a table of coffee and snacks to fortify through the meeting.

It was Lake City Development Corp.’s annual planning session — the time the urban renewal board uses to prioritize what projects it should spend its money on for the upcoming fiscal year.

Mayor Sandi Bloem stood up and told the sparse crowd it could be now or never on a much-discussed project.

“There’s only a short time left,” Bloem said. “It might be the time to bring McEuen forward.”

A short time, because the Lake District was set to close in about 11 years.

The Lake District is the urban renewal boundary in which McEuen Field sits — the boundary where property tax increment financing could pay for a project. If the project was going to happen like the city always said it should, it needed to happen sooner rather than later, Bloem said.

Eleven years is a blink of an eye in the financial world, the board agreed, and marked the park as a high priority.

Later that year, LCDC paid $100,000 of the $125,000 contract for a group of local engineers and designers, called Team McEuen, to create a plan for completely reshaping McEuen Field.

That plan was introduced to the public at the end of 2010, and the rest is history.

But what does history look like?

After 26 months, countless meetings and 154 news articles in the Press archives about the park, the plan has changed, and so have the cost estimates.

On Tuesday, bids for the project will be opened and the final price should be known once and for all.

Most people remember the recall effort and the quest for a public vote — all tied to the park project. But what have the costs looked like, and when?

We picked through all those 154 articles and pieced together a timeline of the more famous numbers. Remember $82 million? If not, it’s in there. So are $14 million and $40 million. We also included some quotes at the time. There have been some famous ones.

Yes, Woody, that means yours.