ARLINGTON — Chris Nussbaum drove to Universal Aerospace at the Arlington Municipal Airport a few times when he worked for other aerospace companies.
It wasn’t until he was hired as vice president at the company a year and a half ago that he realized just how bad traffic was along Highway 531.
“Sometimes it can take you 20 minutes to get from the freeway to the airport, which is about a mile to a mile and half,” Nussbaum said.
The highway narrows from four lanes near I-5 to two lanes without any shoulders heading east toward Highway 9. The area around the airport has several major employers including Universal, a fabrication and metal shop with 225 employees, Microgreen and OutBack Power.
Rush hour in the mornings and evenings equals a lot of traffic headaches.
“If there’s a wreck or someone gets pulled over for speeding on 531 it’s just a gridlock,” Nussbaum said.
Highway 531 is one of 23 chokepoints throughout the county that have been identified by Snohomish County, the cities, a citizens’ group and businesses as needing improvement, said Troy McClelland, Economic Alliance Snohomish County president and CEO.
The organization has been working behind the scenes for months along with elected officials to make the case for a slice of transportation funding in this next legislative session.
To fix all the traffic problems in the county would cost $3 billion. McClelland said they can make a convincing case to address 17 of the most egregious chokepoints, which would require $1.076 billion.
Some of the fixes could include widening 531, improving the Highway 526 corridor and replacing the Snohomish River Bridge over Highway 9.
Transportation seems to be on the agenda for lawmakers in this next session. Lawmakers promised to work on the transportation system when Boeing agreed to build the 777X in the Puget Sound area, eventually deciding to assemble the aircraft at Paine Field in Everett.
No deal materialized in the last session. This session, transportation figures to be a top priority.
“I think you can characterize this as being one of the outstanding items that was discussed,” McClelland said.
Democrats and Republicans both want to get a transportation package put together, said Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens, who is the ranking Democrat on the Transportation Committee. He said he’s hearing about traffic from constituents and businesses.
“It’s not just big businesses like Microsoft and Amazon,” Hobbs said. “We’re talking small businesses. They’re all interested in this. They all want to make sure their workers are getting to work and getting home safely and getting their products to market on time.”
On Dec. 16, Gov. Jay Inslee announced his transportation plan that includes a transportation package that raises $12 billion with bonds, fees and a carbon charge on the state’s industrial polluters. The market-based pollution charge would generate $7 billion over 12 years.
But Inslee’s plan would only direct $81.8 million for highway projects in Everett and other areas of Snohomish County. That’s far less than what Economic Alliance Snohomish County and other elected and business leaders are hoping to obtain.
McClelland said elected and business leaders were extremely disappointed. The governor’s plan has King County receiving $3.9 billion, Pierce County receiving $1.1 billion and Spokane County receiving $430 million, he said.
“You’re probably not surprised that people were stunned,” McClelland said. “They just couldn’t understand it.”
The governor’s transportation package surprised Hobbs. It benefited King and Pierce counties too much and did too little for the rest of the state, Hobbs said.
“I looked at that and thought, ‘Here’s something that we need to improve upon — why would any legislators in Snohomish County vote on that package?’”
Snohomish County can make a compelling case for transportation dollars, McClelland said. Snohomish County is ripe for job growth with 700 acres of readily available industrial land between Paine Field and Arlington. And the county is already the manufacturing backbone of the state with 220 aerospace suppliers and 47,000 aerospace employees.
And one of the reasons for a transportation package is the promise to Boeing, McClelland said.
“We view it as work that needs to be done to follow through on our commitments to all of aerospace and the advanced manufacturing community,” McClelland said.
He said $1.076 billion is roughly 12 percent of a $10 billion tax package. And 12 percent is roughly the economic output per year by the county, McClelland said.
It’s a case that McClelland and elected officials have been making to lawmakers, most recently on a van tour in October with Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, of these chokepoints. The traffic problems have become more pronounced in just the past couple of years. He said there are problem areas that are creating waves of traffic, McClelland said.
One sign is the commute time into King County where thousands of Snohomish County residents work. Commute times on some mornings are taking 100 minutes or more, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation.
McClelland thinks it’s at least in part a sign of a recovering economy. With more people going to work, it means that more people are on the roads.
“I think we’ve been building toward this for some time,” McClelland said. “We’ve just kind of hit a tipping point.”
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