Russell: The entire process for this project started 15 years ago. Back in 1999, we started going out to the community. We had a Citizens Advisory Committee advise us on what we needed to do out here because obviously as anybody can see if they drive down it, it does impact a lot of homes and businesses. So we started there and it did include working with businesses.
In the early 2000s we had a business-only meeting. At that time we had three different alternatives for widening the corridor: we could widen on the existing alignment, which is what we’re doing today, we could widen to the north [or to the south] by basically punching a new highway through. In this case, the community said ‘We don’t want to be bypassed. We want you to widen right here on the existing corridor.’ We said okay, but explained that would require us to buy property and that it would require us to have a median barrier.
Q: What changes have been made to address business owners’ concerns?
Russell: Skip Ogden (president of Dan’s Tractor Inc.) had some concerns about trucks being able to access his business. We looked at putting in a wider driveway for him, which we are going to be doing. We also looked at providing a way for trucks to make U-turns on the corridor because of the barrier … So at 29th, 50th and 72nd we are allowing U-turns and it will be signed and everything. It will be nice and wide.
At 92nd, which is up closer to Mr. Ogden’s business, semi-trucks will actually be able to make a wide U-turn from the right lane. That’s not something that we’ve ever done to my knowledge in the region and maybe even in other regions in Washington state.
Q: What do you tell business owners who remain concerned about the new median barrier?
Russell: We understand they don’t like the barrier. It is a requirement for this project. We can’t make everyone happy and we completely understand their concerns. We have requirements based on state and federal law. So we have to try to find that happy medium and we’ve done the best we feel we can. We certainly are not coming up to them and saying you have to live with this because that’s not how it works.
It doesn’t always work for every single person, but I think you can say that about any public works project anywhere. We definitely wanted to work with the business community as much as we could within the constraints that we have – funding and law. We appreciate where they are coming from. This is their livelihood.
Q: Certainly there will be impacts during construction, but what is WSDOT’s outlook post-construction?
Russell: The long-term is much rosier in that it opens up room for more development and it improves the system. The future is what we are looking at.
Q: How can local businesses get more information about the project?
Russell: The most targeted way is the Listserv email that is dedicated to keeping people informed about the project. The intent is not to spam them by any means, but to alert them of big milestones and traffic impacts. Also we have a twitter account for Southwest Washington (twitter.com/wsdot_sw) and we tweet a lot of traffic information and things like that. We have a project webpage for the project (www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/sr502/widening) and we have a travel alert (www.wsdot.com/traffic/trafficalerts), which is a statewide page that you can narrow down by highway.
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