Council discusses road construction plan
The Spokane Valley City Council is in the process of reviewing the latest incarnation of the six-year road construction plan, delaying some projects and tentatively adding a few more, should funding for them materialize.
One of the largest projects, which would reconfigure the Pines/Interstate 90 interchange and add a traffic light at Mansfield Avenue, won’t start this summer as planned and is now scheduled to begin next year.
New projects for next year include a $400,000 to upgrade outdated traffic signals citywide with controllers that could eventually plug in to a regional traffic management system.
Another new project scheduled for next year is the reconstruction of a small section of Barker Road on the south end of the city. Spokane County is going to rebuild Barker north to 32nd Avenue, where a lot of development is occurring in the unincorporated area, and the Spokane Valley City Council agreed to spend $40,000 so that a small stretch of the road in the city will match the rest of it.
On Sullivan Road next year, crews will replace rutted asphalt with cement between Mission Avenue and the westbound I-90 ramps, which will coordinate with a state Transportation Department project at the interchange. The city project’s cost will be $450,000.
At its meeting Tuesday, the council held a public hearing on the six-year transportation improvement plan, which cities are required to write and revise each year.
Greenacres neighborhood advocate Mary Pollard opposed the planned expansion of Mission and Flora roads and asked for more pedestrian pathways. She was the only person who testified at the hearing.
The City Council is expected to adopt the plan in June.
While the TIP lists 44 road projects of varying size across the city, whether they receive the needed federal or state funding is hit or miss. Some projects go ahead as predicted on the first TIP on which they appear. Others are pushed back for years as city officials apply for grant funding, complete environmental studies or move them to the bottom of the list as more pressing projects are proposed.
Nonetheless, the document encompasses all the road work the city would like to complete over the next six years if funding becomes available.
New projects in the TIP include:
• A 10 foot bike and pedestrian path along 44th Avenue in the Ponderosa neighborhood: cost $209,000, scheduled for 2008
• Installing fiber optic cable to coordinate traffic lights on Pines: cost $133,000, scheduled for 2008
• Adding a traffic light at Sprague and Conklin: cost $300,000, scheduled for 2009
• Upgrading the Argonne/Knox intersection to add new signal poles and change the curb to accommodate turning trucks: cost $436,000, finished in 2009
• Adding a right turn lane for northbound traffic at the Argonne/Montgomery intersection: cost $205,000, finished in 2009
• Five projects, some existing and some added this year, will reconstruct Barker as a three lane road from 32nd in Spokane County to Trent over the next six years.
• Anticipating large scale development in newly annexed sections of Liberty Lake, Mission is slated to be rebuilt as a three lane road from Flora to Barker in 2012. Other projects anticipated in 2011 and 2012 would rebuild eastern sections of Broadway, install a traffic light at the intersection of Sullivan and Saltese, add a truck lane to southbound Carnahan, reconfigure the SR27/Pines/16th Avenue intersection and install a pedestrian crossing over SR 27 at 24th.