Sewer work bumps Valleyway speeders

Little Kiralei Godfrey of Valleyway Avenue, in a pink flower skirt and her hair in barrettes, stood on the street’s edge and shouted the two-word warning she uttered almost as early as she could say “mother.”

“Slow down!” said the 3-year-old. “Slow down,” to the pizza drivers, racing against congealing cheese and the 30-minute delivery deadline. They drive so fast that the little girl and everything else in their wake feel their back draft. “Slow down,” she yelled to commuters frustrated by the stoplights on Sprague Avenue four blocks to the south.

Valleyway, six miles long, is Spokane Valley’s longest east-west through street without a stoplight. The drivers gun 45 mph down the shoulderless, two-lane road to save precious minutes.

On this street, like many of the older residential streets in Spokane Valley, street lamps appear only every few blocks. There are no sidewalks. The road ends where front lawns begin. Children, horses and the local wildlife all share the asphalt with whatever barrels down the street. The posted speed is 25 mph.

Kiralei’s parents, Abbie and Dennis Godfrey, along with Cherie and Randy Russell, the folks next door, are at wit’s end. All they want is to know their children are safe in the neighborhood, especially in their own yards.

They’re tired of charging into the street like lions guarding their cubs whenever a car approaches. They’re done asking themselves why a little girl like Kiralei understands “slow down” before she’s even out of Pampers, but motorists shooting down Valleyway just can’t get it.

“I want to throw things at them,” Cherie Russell said. “I want to run out into the street and lie down. It’s like a mini-Sprague. It’s ridiculous not to be able to let our kids play in the front yard.”

Dennis Godfrey nods his head in agreement. Whenever the air fills with the growl of racing engines, he’s in the front yard giving speeders the dickens.

“They just stomp on the gas if you look at them,” Godfrey said. And if the traffic along this tree-lined road where children play and dogs wander wasn’t enough, there’s the garbage.

The street used to be behind a state liquor store on Progress Road and Sprague. Empty airline-size bottles were a common sight on the roadside, Godfrey said. Now the store has moved to Broadway Avenue. Now it’s someone else’s problem.

This summer, the Godfreys and the Russells got a break from the traffic, though it may well be their last. The cars they couldn’t slow have been detoured for sewer line construction. Construction crews rip through a neighborhood every summer, threading blue, PVC waste pipe down trenches in the street deep enough to swallow a minivan.

“I’ve been sleeping so sound lately,” Cherie Russell said. She and the neighbors laugh at the suggestion that it took a hole in the road to quell their traffic problems, which they know will be back as soon as new asphalt is laid.

They are just enjoying the ebb in the tide of progress. Having the sewer will likely bring more homes and more motorists. Most of those homes will be built on cul-de-sacs that drain onto streets like this one.

The summer has not been easy. On one occasion, Abbie Godfrey had to get to the hospital but couldn’t get around the machinery clawing at the street. She went off road, blazing a trail through a neighbor’s backyard before hitting a gravel trail.

The Russells’ underground sprinkler system has been clipped by toothy, earth-moving buckets more than once, and when the steamrollers shake the dirt into place, it’s enough to make the good China clatter.

But the children have been playing in the front yard this summer, without their mothers flying out the front door to challenge racing traffic.

Little Kiralei Godfrey has found better things to say.