The road not taken

Gig Harbor’s streets undergo an overhaul — and development is driving the change

Paige Richmond

of the Gateway

GROWING PAINS

Seeds of Change

This is the first of a three-part series on the growth and its impacts on the greater Gig Harbor peninsula. Here’s a look at the stories on the way in the next three weeks:

TODAY — Seeds of change: Infrastructure and construction; population growth in the past decade.

A Oct. 8 — Seasons of adjustment: Bridge history and the impact on traffic; Mapping future development; new business boom.

A Oct. 15 — New harvests: Bike paths on the peninsulas; mass transit; improved safety on state, county corridors.

These days, Canterwood Boulevard looks more like a construction site than a road. The pavement has been stripped, leaving only dirt and dust where two lanes once were, and 5-foot-wide trenches have been dug on either side. On any given day, there are trackhoes, dump trucks and a 350-ton crane crowding the 1,400-foot stretch of road, which was closed by the City of Gig Harbor in late August.

The entire project — adding a new lane of traffic, raising the road four feet higher, building a fish-friendly culvert and installing underground stormwater storage tanks — has to be completed by February.

The road itself must be re-opened to traffic by the end of the month.

That amount of work, plus a tight time constraint, makes this the most complicated project the City of Gig Harbor has undertaken.

“There’s more going on with this small stretch of road than I’ve ever seen,” said George Flanigan, the city’s construction manager.

And it’s not the last of its kind for Gig Harbor: In the next year, the city will spend $11 million to improve, repave and build new streets, including an $8.2 million temporary interchange solution on state Route 16. The permanent solution, which must be complete by 2011, could cost as much as $40 million.

Those costs are in addition to the $3.4 million spent on Canterwood Boulevard this year, and $5 million last year on the 56th Street NW and Olympic Drive NW Improvements Project.

Flanigan himself is overseeing nine other street projects inside city limits right now, more than he’s ever dealt with while working for the city.

Gig Harbor’s infrastructure is undergoing a massive overhaul, and most of the projects stem from one source.

“It’s growth,” said Flanigan. “As everybody knows — just drive around town and you can see it,” he said. “It’s gone crazy.”

And the city’s infrastructure isn’t keeping up with Gig Harbor’s growth, causing problems with city funds and affecting growth in the future.

Problem funds the solution

A growing city means more stress on its infrastructure. In simple terms, if the city expands — whether it’s by bringing in new business, building new homes or annexing more land — the city also sees more physical wear and tear.

The best example of that stress is the Waste Water Treatment Plant, which hit capacity last year, causing an unofficial moratorium on development. Now, doubling the plant’s capacity will cost the city $15 million in 2009 and millions more in the next few years.

The city is trying to prevent the road system from meeting the same messy fate as the sewage system, which is why there are so many road projects happening all at once.

The city has a six-year and 20-year Transportation Improvement Plan that predicts how much traffic city roads will see in the future. But those plans are being implemented more quickly than anticipated.

City Administrator Rob Karlinsey estimates that Gig Harbor is “a little behind” on keeping up with its road improvements, but that there have been “more (road projects) in the last two years” than ever before.

The city’s six-year Transportation Improvement Plan predicts there will be 7,621 dwelling units in Gig Harbor by 2013 — about 2,000 more than exist today. By that time, there will be 19,271 people working here, 1,000 more than today.

“We’re trying to keep a sharp eye when development comes in,” said David Stubchaer, the city’s public works director, “to make sure we have traffic concurrency.”

Legally, the city has to provide wider, safer roads to accommodate all those people driving, based on a traffic concurrency ordinance passed by the council in the 1990s.

“In terms of dollar amounts, number of projects, and size and length of project, we’re busier now than we’ve ever been, since I’ve been on the council and probably the life of city,” said 10-year Gig Harbor City Council Member Derek Young.

The city’s administration is now working overtime to bring the roads up to speed with development, but it’s easy to wonder how this problem arose. With a Comprehensive Plan and a Transportation Plan in place — with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on development fees each year — shouldn’t the city staff or council have predicted this growth, and then prepared for it?

The short answer: They did. But their financial hands were tied.

“In some ways, you can plan for the growth,” Young said. “But that doesn’t mean you can pay for it.”

Infrastructure in Gig Harbor is paid for mostly with taxpayer dollars. Impact fees are charged to new developers, and new shoppers at new businesses provide the city with more sales tax. New residents who move into new homes pay taxes. The taxes are then put into a capital fund that pays for things like roads.

But it’s a catch-22: The city doesn’t see higher tax dollars until after the new developments are already built. That means the city has to borrow money to fund infrastructure improvements ahead of development.

And that borrowed money has to be paid back eventually, and it’s usually paid back with taxes and fees.

Factor in rising construction costs — Young estimates asphalt and building costs have doubled in the past 10 years — and the extra time it takes to plan a road project when state environmental restrictions have tightened, and projects fall behind.

The situation is not unique to Gig Harbor, said Terry Lee, Pierce County Council Chairman and Gig Harbor’s council rep. There are a lot of areas that experience growth, whether it’s predicted or not, that deal with infrastructure problems.

“It would be nice, in a perfect world, to provide the solutions before the problem arises,” he said. “But I’ve never seen that happen.”

‘A perfect storm’ of development

There’s one more reason why the city is outgrowing its roads: Growth happened more rapidly than the city anticipated.

“Our 20-year plan for growth happened in about five years,” Young said.

Much of that growth, both Young and Lee agreed, was on account of the new Narrows Bridge, which opened in July 2007. While it may not have been the direct cause of growth, the new span helped speed up and facilitate a process that was already happening.

“One thing that stifled growth was the congestion that people experienced on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,” said Lee, who added that the Gig Harbor and Key peninsulas are now “wide open, very accessible, but highly desirable.”

The simple answer for the new bridge is that the old span had reached capacity.

“It’s not a build-it-and-they-will-come situation,” Lee said. “They were already here.”

Young estimates the people who lived here were no longer content to cross the Narrows to do simple things like go shopping or see a movie. More areas, such as Gig Harbor North, started opening up to development. That’s when it became easier to work, shop and — most importantly — buy property in Gig Harbor.

The YMCA, Costco and the Uptown Gig Harbor shopping center all opened in the span of a year.

“It was a perfect storm of development,” Young said. “You get the bridge, low rates, good economy and a bunch of land available in Gig Harbor — and it’s gonna happen.”

Since then, the city has struggled to keep up. Karlinsey feels his staff has done a good job — finishing the 56th Street NW and Olympic Drive NW Improvements Project on time is one example — but it’s hard to stay ahead of the game when the “floodgate of growth has broken loose.”

Roads like Borgen Boulevard, which will have to be widened and improved to accommodate increased traffic before St. Anthony Hospital opens next year, are wearing down.

Part of the reason is because Gig Harbor’s streets aren’t just serving Gig Harbor residents; they’re serving residents of the Key Peninsula and beyond.

As Gig Harbor has grown, it’s become more of an urban center for the rural areas on the Key Peninsula. There are no major grocery stores on the KP, which means residents drive to places like Albertson’s at Gig Harbor North to shop.

The wear and tear that outside visitors bring to city roads is harder for the city to anticipate. That means the city, in Young’s words, has to “play way above our weight.”

Calculating capacity for those roads becomes more complicated.

“It’s something that makes perfect sense when you think about,” said Lee, who represents many Pierce County citizens who live outside Gig Harbor city limits. “But when you’re thinking of the immediate areas these interchanges are going to serve, you think of Gig Harbor North and nothing beyond it.”

The problem is further complicated when state Route 16 becomes a factor, Lee said. Because it’s a state highway, SR16 is under the jurisdiction of WSDOT. The addition of the new Narrows bridge didn’t just alleviate congestion on the highway, it shifted traffic into the city.

Keeping up with momentum

Planning these road improvements has kept and will keep the city busy for some time. By next month, the city council will approve the 2008 budget; it will likely contain nine different projects for next year totaling more than $11 million.

On Thursday, the city will hold an open house to discuss the six- and 20-year Transportation Improvement Plans with citizens.

There are 29 short-term road improvement projects planned for the next six years. Some are complicated, such as extending 38th Avenue to meet 56th Street, which will cost $10 million by 2010; others are more simple, such as installing a traffic signal at the intersection of Wagner Way and Wollochet Drive, which will cost $300,000 next year.

The biggest project is the interim and long-term solutions to the Burnham-Borgen-state Route 16 interchange, which the city will decide later this month. The improvements are necessary to meet traffic concurrency for yet another development: St. Anthony Hospital.

The total cost of improving the highway, building either a single-point or split-diamond interchange, and widening Borgen Boulevard, will cost $30 million to $40 million by 2011.

The city doesn’t have that much money on hand; the hope is that WSDOT or earmarks and grants from the federal government will help fund it.

BB16 is one of those unique situations — both in terms of funding and responsibility — that the city likely could not have prevented.

“Rarely is a little city like us tasked with designing and building a freeway interchange,” Karlinsey said.

Money in all projects is the big question. Revenues are down slightly this year, and that changes priorities. Improving 38th Street was supposed to happen in 2009, but it’s been pushed back to 2010.

Hindsight, of course, is 20/20: The city could have sacrificed projects in the past 10 years to save money for current projects. For instance, not purchasing as much park property — Eddon Boat and Wilkinson Farm are two examples — might have saved $5 million, Young estimates.

“Could we have poured more money into transportation? Probably,” Young said. “But think of what we would have lost.”

For now, the city is focused on keeping on schedule and accomplishing the tasks at hand. Things might be difficult for both city staff and for residents, especially since these fast-moving projects often include road closures to speed up the process, but it’s a necessary evil.

“It’s an excessive schedule, but it’s part of the planning schedule,” Stubchaer said. “We go in with our eyes open, rather than getting caught having not thought about it.”

Not thinking about an increasing population, more development and the effect both will have on roads is a risk the city can’t take. If the city can’t mitigate traffic concurrency, the development moratorium caused by sewer capacity will repeat itself — except this time, traffic concurrency will be to blame.

“If you can’t keep infrastructure current with growth, you can’t offer development permits,” Lee warned. “It becomes self-limiting.”

And that’s a problem with its own consequences.

Reach Reporter and Columnist Paige Richmond at 253-853-9243 or by e-mail at paige.richmond@gateline.com.