Widen Highway 9.
Rebuild the U.S. 2 trestle – maybe with some help from a driver toll.
Rebuild some I-5 interchanges.
Widen Highway 522.
Make U.S. 2 safer.
All five popular proposals for road fixes were included on the Regional Transportation Investment District project list the Snohomish County Council adopted Friday.
The council will now send that list – which proposes to spend $1.73 billion on more than 50 Snohomish County projects – to an executive board made up of county council members from Snohomish, King and Pierce counties.
The list needs a few more approvals before going to voters, but since the individual county councils have the final say, Friday’s decision goes a long way toward deciding what will be on the ballot in Snohomish County in November 2007, councilman Dave Gossett said.
“This is it,” he said.
Also Friday, the council selected a boundary for the road tax district, one that now includes Monroe, Snohomish, Lake Stevens, Marysville, Arlington and Tulalip.
Including those cities means it is no longer possible to match boundaries with Sound Transit’s tax district. Officials from both had hoped to merge the boundaries so their road and transit tax packages could appear on the ballot as one measure.
Gossett said matching boundaries became impossible when the east and north county cities declined to join Sound Transit.
Legislation passed last spring requires that the two tax packages be linked on the ballot. Without joint boundaries, voters will see two ballot measures that are connected: If one measure fails, the other automatically fails, too.
So, if there’s going to be one ballot measure, it’s now in the hands of the state Legislature, which would have to write a new law.
Some officials from Sound Transit and the county councils that control the road taxing district have said they worry that having linked but separate ballot measures could confuse voters, causing them to vote no.
As for the road project list, several Snohomish County councilmen offered tweaks on Friday before giving it the thumbs up.
Gossett asked to have the state Department of Transportation study whether it’s feasible to use tolls to help pay for the cost of rebuilding the U.S. 2 trestle.
Councilman Dave Somers asked to use money earmarked for a bypass highway around Monroe to make safety updates to U.S. 2.
“The Monroe bypass is a nice addition, but to me safety is first,” Somers said.
The county won’t know how much those improvements will cost and how viable they are until the state Department of Transportation finishes a U.S. 2 safety study in mid-November.
Somers asked to keep the bypass highway on the table until the safety report is released.
He also asked to steer some of the bypass money to Highway 9, where initial project lists left off the $165 million cost of building a new bridge over the Snohomish River.
At Somers’ request, the council agreed to widen Highway 9 from south to north, pushing as far north as funding allows.
Councilman John Koster asked that a plan to spend $55 million widening the 172nd Street NE corridor in Smokey Point extend all the way to Highway 9. It previously would have gone only as far as 67th Avenue NE.
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