State puts the brakes on road work in county

By Susanna Ray

Herald Writer

Legislative confusion last year and the state’s cash crunch this year have resulted in a delay for several Snohomish County road projects and sent others back to the starting line, where they’ll have to compete for funding all over again next year.

More than a quarter of the Department of Transportation’s $282 million budget for new construction has disappeared, leaving a $76 million hole that officials decided earlier this week to cut from planned projects.

A $15 million chunk of that has come from road projects in Snohomish County that now have been postponed, most of them indefinitely, including:

Widening Highway 527 from 164th Street SE to 132nd Street SE.

Widening Highway 525 from Highway 99 to Paine Field Boulevard.

Widening Highway 9 from Highway 522 to 212th Street SE, as well as widening the shoulders and making other safety improvements along the highway from Schloman Road to 256th Street SE.

Widening Highway 522 from the Snohomish River to the Paradise Lake Road intersection, including construction of interchanges there and at Fales-Echo Lake Road.

The first phase of the U.S. 2/Highway 522 bypass in Monroe, a traffic signal on U.S. 2 at Fifth Street in Sultan and signals and other improvements on the ramps for the U.S. 2/Highway 9 interchange.

Widening the northbound shoulder on I-5 from 220th Street SW to 44th Avenue W. in south Snohomish Co. and redesigning the I-5 interchange at 128th Street SW to increase capacity.

Designing a new fixed-span bridge to replace the Ebey Slough draw bridge on Highway 529 in Marysville.

Construction hadn’t yet started on any of these projects, but some preliminary work had begun, such as building noise walls and moving utilities, said Lorena Eng, the regional administrator for the department’s Northwest region.

Budget problems and delays in road projects are common, Eng said, but not situations of this magnitude.

Widening work on Highway 525 will start this fall instead of this month. Some of the work that had been scheduled to start this year on highways 522 and 527 has been delayed until next spring.

The rest of the projects will now be sent back into the project pool to start the funding process all over again next year.

"We’ve been waiting for these (projects) forever, so yeah, we’re not happy at the delay or postponement or cancellation," said Peter Hahn, Snohomish County’s public works director. "That was a really nasty surprise."

The shortfall wasn’t intentional, several transportation officials and legislators said. Apparently there was some confusion in last-minute merging of the separate House and Senate transportation budgets last year, and a $100 million transfer from the general fund didn’t go through.

"It doesn’t look like it was anything other than it was the last day of session and all the numbers didn’t get moved around properly," said Rep. Mike Cooper, D-Edmonds, the vice chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

The problem was exacerbated this year when legislators were faced with a $1.6 billion shorfall in the general fund because of the slumping economy that was further hampered by the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Legislators were able to restore some of the lost transportation money, but not all of it, Cooper said.

"People need to know that these projects will go on," Eng said. "There is a commitment to do that. It’s just that it will be a little slower."

A complete list of delayed projects across the state is scheduled to be posted Monday on the department’s Web site, www.wsdot.wa.gov.

You can call Herald Writer Susanna Ray at 425-339-3439

or send e-mail to ray@heraldnet.com.