WSDOT Update
Our special guest speaker on June 9th was Lorena Eng, NW Regional Administrator for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). Ms. Eng has been with WSDOT for 16 years. Her last visit to our club was in 2013. Back in April, Jim Brown and Tes Abraha briefed us on the SR9/SR204 interchange. Ms. Eng will update us on a variety of other projects in our area.
Lorena oversees 1,100 employees and a biennial budget of $900 million dollars which is up over $50 million dollars from three years ago. Her staff is responsible for the planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance of over 4,000 lane miles of federal and state highways from the Pierce County line to the Canadian border in the 6 county Northwest Region on the west side of the Cascades. Lorena received her civil engineering degree in 1979 from the University of Washington. (Go Dawgs).
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Lorena commented that we have an aging infrastructure with the theme and goal of FIX IT FIRST, KEEP IT SAFE AND FINISH WHAT WE STARTED. The topics were addressed on Friday morning as follows: Fix It First (Preservation Projects); Keep It Safe (Safety Improvements); Fish Barrier Correction and Finish What We Start (Connecting Washington). Fix It First - pavements $26 million; Bridge preservation $8.5 million; Keep It Safe - $31 million and Fish Passage - $4.9 million. Connecting Washington investment in Snohomish County - $501.5 million.
SR 9 Corridor improvements include SR9/S204 Interchange. - $69.5 million for design, right of way acquisition and construction. Design Build in 2019. SR9/4th Street NE Access Project - $420,000 to design a new access point from SR 9 through a northbound right turn lane. Construction to be concurrent with interchange construction. Other improvements to SR 9 corridor include the widening of Marsh Road to 2nd Street in Snohomish - $142 million with design to start in mid-2019 and Design Build to begin in 2022. New southbound bridge over the Snohomish River and overflow structure south of Snohomish River. Numerous other SR 9 corridor improvements are SR 9/176th Street to SR 96.
One of the larger and most interesting projects to our area is improvements to US 2 Trestle/SR 204 and 20th SE. Cost for the justification report are estimated at $1.5 million; finance study at $350,000 and transit congestion jump at $1.8 million. Another big issue is I-5 improvements amounting to $134.4 million. So there is a lot going in our area that impacts our areas transportation network.
We want to thank Lorena Eng for taking time from her very busy schedule to update our Club on infrastructure improvements coming to our area in the near future.