In rainy pacific northwest, the construction season is short and the time to move dirt begins in the summer when soil dries out and wraps up in the fall when rain turns the ground to mud. More than 30 projects planned for construction are in jeopardy of being delayed indefinitely due to a recently discovered glitch in the Clark County transportation concurrency code.
“Concurrency” is a state law requirement that the transportation infrastructure needed to support development is in place “concurrently” with the development. County transportation engineers evaluate both street corridors and intersections, paying close attention to intersections since intersections are the choke points that can cause traffic to back up along the corridor.
When corridors fail to meet the 0.9 “volume to capacity” standard – a ratio of the volume of traffic over the theoretical engineering capacity of the roadway, County engineers evaluate whether the corridors are operating acceptably by analyzing how traffic is flowing along the corridors and whether traffic is backing up due to congestion at the intersections along the corridor.
However, at a public hearing on a subdivision in the 179th Street area in April, a project opponent using AI to evaluate the traffic engineering argued that the County code states corridors “shall” meet the 0.9 “volume to capacity” standard, leaving no room for County engineering staff to exercise engineering judgement in evaluating how the corridor is operating.
A decision on the 179th Street subdivision is due at the end of June, but at the hearing the Hearing Examiner indicated that he needed to interpret the code literally, which would result in denial of the project, despite County engineers’ professional judgment that the corridor has adequate capacity.
If the 179th Street subdivision is denied because of this issue, the effects will spill over to any other project sending traffic to a street corridor that does not meet the standard. Currently portions of 99th Street, 119th Street, 139th Street, 179th Street, 94th Avenue, Padden Parkway and SR 503 do not meet the standard, potentially affecting more than 30 projects that were in the pipeline for approval.
Projects must obtain land use approval before they can be reviewed for construction approval and ultimately start moving dirt. A delay in land use approvals will impact construction for the next few years, which in turn could create a drag on the local economy.
Clark County has options for how to address this issue. One option would be to amend the classification of 99th Street, 119th Street, 139th Street, 179th Street, 94th Avenue, Padden Parkway and SR 503 to add additional lanes to those roads to add capacity by turning these roads into six lane highways. That would involve removing buildings and homes along these roads to make room for the new lanes, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, while also making those roads more difficult to navigate for pedestrians and bicycles due to the wider cross section at intersections. However, according to County engineers, 179th Street has adequate capacity, making new lanes an unnecessary expenditure.
The other option for fixing the dilemma would be for the County to amend the code to make the language consistent with the County’s practice of using the 0.9 “volume to capacity” standard as a factor in the overall analysis of how the corridor is operating rather than an absolute threshold that must be met. The County could either do this as an emergency fix pursuant to its state law authority to adopt interim zoning measures under the Growth Management Act, or the County could amend the code through the usual process for zoning code amendments. However, the regular process for code amendments takes many months, which would be too late to save the 2026 construction season and could have spillover effects into 2027 and 2028.
Many eyes will be watching for the Hearing Examiner’s decision on the 179th Street subdivision and to see how Clark County addresses the issue after that ruling. Regardless of how the Hearing Examiner rules in this particular case, the language of the concurrency code seems inconsistent with how the County transportation engineers have been applying the code for the past 12 years. That inconsistency is creating a lot of uncertainty about the ability of Clark County to approve new development projects to accommodate growth and could affect the County’s ability to meet its state mandated growth management obligations under the new Comprehensive Plan proposed for adoption in October.
