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HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 11/20/2001 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES NOVEMBER 20, 2001 COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: President Leona Orr, Tom Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Judy Woods, Greg Worthing, Rico Yingling STAFF PRESENT: Mike Martin, Tim LaPorte, Gary Gill, Steve Mullen, Jackie Bicknell PUBLIC PRESENT: Barb Ivanov, Julie Peterson, Ed Parks The workshop began at 5:06 PM. Freieht Mobility Project Report Barb Ivanov, Executive Director, Kent Chamber of Commerce—It has been my pleasure to manage a project that you have sponsored and invested in for the last 2'/2 years. Out of that has come deep, real, new knowledge about how the freight mobility system of things that move on the highways and byways and freeways and bridges, how the trucking firms, shipping £inns, rail lines, how all that stuff works together and actually functions. We're back with an update. We want to make sure that you are informed, and I especially asked my partner to close with some findings that are going to be key to your decision-making as elected officials. I want to introduce Ed Parks. We worked together initially as members of the team. When he was with the Port of Seattle at SeaTac International Airport,he was in charge of all of the security and transit for the WTO meetings. Since that time he left the Port of Seattle and was available and willing to work on just this project for us. Thanks again • to your sponsorship, we were able to use his excellent talents on sort of Phase 2 of this. Ed Parks—It's a pleasure to be here this evening and to share some of the information that we found out in talking with freight providers around the Puget Sound area, many of them based right here in the valley. The initial tenants of our work was to find out how timely deliveries were getting made around the Puget Sound area. In essence, if you ordered something from somebody, was it being delivered on time and if it wasn't, what was causing that delivery lag. After talking to 26 different firms needing transportation in five different areas,we got, both from the customers and from the freight providers, a pretty hearty pat on the back for all of their partners saying that they were doing a pretty good job of getting freight delivered on time. In all of the talks that I did with different firms, and I can cover those with you, it appears that freight is being dispatched on time between 95 and 97% of the time and dispatched at the correct time and getting to its location between 90 and 100% of the time. There's a variety of reasons that it's happening and a variety of ways it's happening. But the thing that I found most interesting about this, in discussions with Barbara and with everyone else, if there is congestion and delays, the freight companies are sucking it up and finding ways to get around those delays. And it involves land use issues, an expanded work time,working 7/24 throughout the week, and these are all issues that affect things beyond just the normal transportation when we see a delivery van go down the street or a container pulled up to a Loew's Hardware store. So what we were doing in the study was collecting data from those firms that would share data with us to try and establish an industry standard, so we could go out to trucking firms around here and say, well, if you're not getting at least 90%of your goods delivered on time, you've got something to • shoot for because most of your competitors are doing that. It's establishing an industry standard for the Pacific Northwest and then looking at best practices. How are firms managing themselves to get freight delivered on time and to operate in the ever changing environment that we have to live in and Council Workshop, 11/20/01 2 then to quantify those aggregate impacts on traffic and congestion and how we might help influence • decision making regarding transportation projects and decisions about transportation within the Puget Sound Region. The five study areas we looked at were: Manufacturing, Institutional Concerns, Warehousing, Retail, and the Construction Industry. Of the 26 different firms I talked to on a pretty regular basis, 9 were willing to share some information with us. Granted, many of these are competitors. Even pledging whatever secrecy and that that we had in confidentiality between labor issues and competitiveness and as a gentleman from Safeway said, when I deliver things, if I'm late, that's between the customer and me. Thank you very much. However, we were able to get some pretty good information from many of these firms even if it wasn't quantifiable and they were able to say, oh yeah,well this month we were around 93% on time. Now, what we're talking about as on time is meeting a delivery window. And we found that through the study period that delivery window changed for many of our firms. Generally speaking, a company will say well we'd need to get deliveries between 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock in the morning and so if a truck shows up at 9:55 they hit the window. You have many manufacturing firms, and let's say Costco is one who's not a manufacturer but one that we talked to, they have 15 minute windows that they take deliveries and if a truck misses that 15 minute window, then they go to the end of the line and they try and work him in during the day but the bottom line is if you miss your window somebody else gets it. It's of interest, because what happens to the truck that misses the window, he generally then has to go find someplace to park and just cool his heels until he starts again which is an issue that we all need to look at. But what happens if the truck gets there a couple of hours early waiting to hit that 15 minutes window, he does the same thing. He parks by the side of the road, gets on the cell phone, calls home. In fact, Golden State Foods, one of our participants down in Sumner,basically said they have a telephone that they've used for ages that is on a four lane road right outside their distribution center and only this year have the Sumner police started ticketing trucks that would pull up next to that phone to try to get into the distribution center because residential development beyond their distribution center has now made that a major urban arterial rather than just a four lane trucking road that it was five years ago. You're seeing changes in land use. I like to call it displacement where we find transportation facilities like a distribution center a prime example—if you know Safeway Distribution Center in Bellevue. It sits right in the Overlake area and there is no change whatsoever that they are ever going to get to expand at that location. So they have to become efficient and if they don't get efficient they move. Well, then you have to build roads to get out to it. It's a displacement issue that we're seeing in many different areas and I dare say that we're seeing it creep into the valley, as well as retail expands or even housing expands, and displaces the warehouses that have been there. Then you have other issues that come up and need to be addressed, particularly by city or local governments that have to deal in land use issues and building permits and transportation. On the second page of the handout, you can see a small chart with the Aggregate On Time Performance that we've seen over the months of June through November. In the dispatch area you're talking 97-98% of dispatches are on time. If it's not done on time it's the oh wait a minute we've got the frozen peas in back, they just came in. Hold the truck for 5 minutes and we'll get the frozen peas on the shipment. And that causes lateness, employee problems, equipment problems, sometimes facility problems, but the primary issue is that things get dispatched at a pretty good rate. The arrival. or the delivery time—you see flags a little bit below there and it's kind of that differential that we're looking at that is affected by congestion on the road, drivers getting lost, equipment failures and so on. The findings that we're coming up with, I guess, are pretty low tech for the most part,but the Council Workshop, 11/20/01 3 first one is very high tech and that is that major distribution firms, and I'll say Safeway, Associated . Grocers, Food Services of America, Sysco Systems, are going high tech. Some of them have GPS in their trucks. All of them have cell phones for their drivers, and there is constant communication and tracking. Each of those companies has a very integrated dispatch system that varies from day to day. They take into account weather conditions, routes, type of equipment needed, security that now has to be considered when delivering to institutions, major buildings that have some perceived threat, hospitals. That is all affecting delivery times, but the big companies who have some capital to play with and generally have larger fleets, and that sort of thing, are becoming high tech. That is driving the smaller undercapitalized general firm out of business. Smaller firms, however, are going into the specialty markets. For instance, fish, meats, flowers, cheeses, in some regards are being delivered at 4 o'clock in the afternoon to restaurants. General deliveries to restaurants occur between midnight and 6 o'clock in the morning because that's when trucks can get in there without impacting business. Again, the difference of this is Golden State Foods, you've seen the truck at McDonald's at 10 o'clock in the morning. It's a franchise operation and the franchisees don't want to have employees there all night to accept these goods. They will take the truck in. There's generally a loading area. At least a parking lot but for grocery stores, deliveries are happening at night. For major restaurants deliveries are happening at night and I dare say that we're going to see fewer and fewer small strip mall Pizza Haven's with a semi truck parked in the middle of the street delivering at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It's not going to happen as much anymore, but we're going to see that and that's one of the things that's really driving a perception of having more trucks on the road than really there are. Traditional warehousing is changing. An interesting figure that I found was that 97% of Wa1Mart's goods never make it to a warehouse. It goes directly from the manufacturer to the store on adjusting • time basis, and that's pretty incredible,particularly for a valley that's full of warehouses. I don't think we're going to go the way of Wa1Mart in everything that we do,but we're seeing that several of the major grocer chains are now building ancillary warehouses up and down the I-5 corridor so they don't have to use the valley as their single distribution point—so they can dispatch general needed goods on a regular basis from Bellingham to even southern Oregon. One of the things I think that is driving us towards social change is these nighttime deliveries. If you have a residential area that's next to a retail core that has deliveries at night, there is going to be truck traffic at night and I think that's an issue that is going to come up, be it noise or pollution or having Safeway drive a refrigerated truck up to the back of their store and leave the refrigerator running and bothering the neighbors. So there may be acoustic barriers to build or buffering uses to be considered. But we're seeing a lot of drivers now starting work at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and working till 10 o'clock and then calling it quits for the day. There are things like childcare or additional city services or what have you that may be needed during those early morning hours that aren't necessarily being addressed now. One thing that I do have to say is that many of the folks that we're working with complimented the City of Kent on the advocacy position and the very positive movement you've made in regard to transportation issues in the valley—the grade separation work on the fast corridor, and that is appreciated by those who know what's happening. A lot of the guys I talked to were dispatchers and they just know that there is construction out there and that things will get better next year. But the vice presidents of logistics are saying, there are some governments that are actually doing some work that are helping us out and are recognizing the problem that we're trying to address. So, I want to compliment you on that and there are a lot of your constituents that are out here that are seeing that happen as well. There are key decision issues that are going to come up not only for local jurisdictions but also the state. The ongoing traffic congestion is an issue that is going to plague us Council Workshop, 11/20/01 4 until hell freezes over probably but it's got to be addressed soon. One of the operational things is • emergency issues on the road. How long do you have to close I-5 for instance or any arterial street if there is an accident there. Can you clear it and talk about it afterwards as opposed to shutting down the freeway for two hours to examine a bad accident. If there was one day to day operation issue that came up loud and clear, and I'll have to say that during the summer one of the prime examples was the lady who jumped off the I-5 bridge and this survey happened right during the middle of that so that's probably one of the swing issues here,but the thing is keep the road open and manage your incidents. Not just for the people who are involved in the incident but the people who are involved because of the incident. Barb Ivanov—The Washington State Secretary of Transportation spoke to a group of Chamber folks this morning and he informed us that 50% of the congestion on our roads is caused by poor incident management. 50% is caused by the lack of infrastructure and lane capacity issues. Half of what we're struggling with could be resolved if all of the actors including local police, state highway patrol, the emergency systems were to use new technology such as computer imaging. Come out, take their shots, move everything off and go on about their business versus out there with the tape measure. This is a really big issue. Secretary Transportation McDonald said they have made it a high priority but again he has control over state DOT. He does not have control over state highway patrol, every local jurisdiction, all the hospitals that are on board, so what you've got are a variety of unintended actors that need to pull together toward that excellent goal. Help the victims of the incident and protect the evidence for insurance purposes and that's a big deal. Ed Parks—Several people mentioned the need for traffic information. These dispatchers monitor • radio, their own driver's talk, television, they've got a computer screen and have all of this plethora of information available to them but they never look at it and so potentially there is a way we could do an advocacy program or an e-mail program. Barb sends out notices regarding road construction to a whole e-mail list that people find extremely interesting and I don't know if they work with it or not but forcing information on these folks to make good decisions about routing trucks and getting equipment places is a potential idea. The land issues we've talked about a little bit. I don't think you're going to find a large hardware store getting by with one truck dock anymore because many of the trucking firms do what they call a "drop and pick"which is they take a trailer and drop it at the dock and leave it there for the day for it to be unloaded by the day crew. If you've only got one dock then you've got to maneuver both trailers in and out or take two tractors to get it. If you had two docks you could leave one, fill the next one, take the trailer back again. So that may be an issue which means more loading docks for large establishments, truck maneuvering areas. How many times do you have a truck pulling across four lanes of an urban arterial to back into a small existing business and blocking traffic during rush hour both directions. The City of Seattle has a restriction on truck size during the day. You can't take a 40 footer downtown after 6 o'clock in the morning or before 6 p.m. So there's a 12 hour period that you cannot get a big truck in the city center without a special permit. For construction and that sort of stuff they certainly do that. Again, I touched on the social issues of having a lot more people working 24 hours a day in the distribution business. Not only from the trucking side but also in the receiving end, potentially somebody being at a restaurant or a restaurant could trust the trucking company with a key to be able to get in without being supervised to make their deliveries. So, overall the transportation system is picking up a lot of slack. They have to deal with off again, on again demand. Right now the demand is really slow. Hotels, restaurants aren't ordering anything because they don't have any business and Council Workshop, 11/20/01 5 so the trucks are in essence either running low or not rumiing and that affects employment and . everything else. You have that, you have the gas situation, insurance, congestion. The trucking companies are living through this and working around it pretty well and I guess that's a surprising thing that we found is that they are serving their customers and the community and doing it in pretty good faith. Barb Ivanov—Just underneath the chart on page 2 there is a list of the firms that reported to Ed at least bi-weekly and that's where we got these data points. GSF actually supplies the McDonald's restaurant chain if you're not familiar with that. I also want to note that the reason we chose these firms specifically is because they already collect this kind of data. When you're looking at this and saying they were quick to evolve over all kinds of obstacles, the system is really doing well, you are looking at the high end, very large,well capitalized firms with big skill sets because those are the ones who have the ability to even collect data. There are numerous small firms as Ed indicated that are extremely low tech who are not going to make it through this latest round of difficulty and unless they choose to specialize are going to find it tough going. Councilmember Rico Yingling—Recently I heard about a study that correlated the cost of living increases of different municipalities. In large metropolitan areas like Seattle there was a positive correlation with the increase of cost of living and increase in congestion. I know your study didn't adjust cost issues but one of the biggest results of the study was that the cost of getting goods to the market was one of the main reasons for that cost of living increase. Ed Parks - It's a very interesting point because most of the firms that we talked to either provide regular transportation services or require large shipments. However, you have somebody like SpaceLabs out in Redmond, almost all • the shipping they do is UPS and FedEx. Time is of an essence and cost is not a factor. Even Optiva Corporation right here in Kent, during the holiday season they will UPS—good size shipments to stores on an emergency basis if they can't get it delivered in time, and so you're seeing a lot of high end products or high demand products just flowing with this cost of living thing. People need the products so badly they will pay anything to get it there and coming from the air freight industry the expeditors and integrators are really pricey. But there are guarantees that if they don't get it delivered at the time they say it's going to be delivered, you don't pay for the service. We haven't found that in the trucking business. They're cost back if you're late, they charge you something. Your customer charges you something, but they always seem to get collected for their service. Barb Ivanov—We talked to the Safeway dispatchers. The kind of issues we're going to be faced with as decision makers are am I going to anger the residents who do not want the big noisy refrigerated truck sitting there, or am I going to anger the residents by making Safeway pay twice as much to build walls around and only allow them to off load during the day which will cause more congestion and anger more residents who see these Safeway trucks now sitting in front of them across these highways. So, your choices are tough ones. Those issues are going to come up again and again and again. That's what we're sadly here to tell you and what we're asking,hopefully with some new good information, is that we all understand there is a cost involved in every decision. There's no way you can get away from the cost. One way or another when we talk to each other whether it's a citizen/resident or as a worker or freight shipper everything has a price and there's a trade. Ed Parks— One of the things that we're seeing, the high delivery rate is they just throw more trucks at the problem. So instead of seeing 10 trucks on the road that can make the deliveries they have the same client base and now they've got 14 out there and all that does is add to the congestion. And not only is the congestion going to be during the rush hour but it's going to be before the rush hour till after the rush hour and that's the issue. When do you close a road down to do construction? That's Council Workshop, 11/20/O1 6 going to be an issue because you may not be able to close it down for 24 hours a day if there is a factory nearby that needs to have deliveries and has no alternative. Councilmember Tim Clark—I sat on a South County Area Transit Board Meeting today and they were going through the potential wish list to go before the federal government and they were at least regionally trying to narrow this down to a figure that actually was going to have a chance of actually surviving through the budget fight and it was interesting to see the number of things that were coming for the Greater South King County area although without knowing how they are actually going to pare that list down I have difficulty identifying projects but your awareness that there is something in the cycle outside of the state budget that is in the works. Barb Ivanov—We would not have known this if you had not stuck your neck out and helped us on that discovery. One of the things for you to know is when we looked at who really fed Kent Chamber, what are our next steps from the Chamber's point of view,Ed, and I, and Karen Schmidt from the state's Freight Mobility Strategic Investment Board, said you are as a group the most innovative in terms of this pushing, would you be interested in and we had to say, even with our City of Kent support, that is perhaps something more than we can deal with this year. We'll continue to try and serve our own customers but to act as a regional hub of that is interesting and intriguing,but we're not going to be coming back to you with a resource request. We also are very cognizant of the kind of limitations you have and are very supportive of sort of the conservative budget approach that you've taken. This particular issue for 2002 is pretty much wrapped up. SR509 Proiect Tim LaPorte, Engineering Department— We have attemped to brief all the council members, and • there is a couple that we have not gotten to, on our 228`h corridor project and where we have gone with that in terms of doing additional studies since our June council meeting. Mr. LaPorte introduced Craig Stone who is the Freight Corridors Project Manager for huge corridors and John White who is the Project Engineer for the SR509 Project. They are here to increase our awareness of the 509 project. Mayor White is on the executive committee for 509 and I'm on the Tactical Staff Advisory Committee and so the purpose of this meeting is to give you more information on 509 itself. Craig Stone—The main point of coming to council on the 509 Project is we're at a point where we're about to issue a draft environmental impact statement on the project level. That will be issued in January of 2002 and we want to meet with each of the councils and commissions that are participating in the project and let you know up front that there are documents coming out. Your staff has a preliminary document right now and they are reviewing that for comments and this way it gives you an understanding and opportunity to ask questions before your citizens become involved with the actual review of the document. We'll have a public hearing at Tyee High School in February. You probably have had some briefing on this and where we're going with it. Try and understand what the ties are with the City of Kent, and the work that we've done is basically includes south access to the airport, I-5 to 509/188`h and so most of the work we've had has been up in the SeaTac/Des Moines area and as we've looked at this and bringing the corridor down into I-5 and then continuing down 272"a/Star Lake and now 320`h. We're now starting to get a lot more influence in the City of Kent especially up in the Midway area and then, as the 228`h project came along, the tie became much stronger at that point. We've had conversations with the mayor and your staff on that. These are broad statements. Basically I-5 Seattle/Tacoma is the most congested corridor in the state and that's why we're looking at 509's ability to balance that system up and down I-5. What the 509 does it actually gives you a route. It almost becomes a west side expressway from a standpoint as it ties in to East Marginal, Highway 99, ls`Avenue South bridge, Alaskan Way viaduct. Council Workshop, 11/20/01 7 Before February 28`h we were talking a lot about that. After February 28`h, with the earthquake ,the • Alaskan Way viaduct has become an essential project. People are working on that. You may have heard Mayor Schell, Secretary McDonald and they are pursuing that and basically what we're trying to say now is we got an opportunity to look at the whole west side facility that basically runs Seattle to Federal Way as an improvement. In the Seattle Times standpoint from where the growth has been the last 10 years, I-5 is the most heavily used freight corridors which kind of ties into the previous conversation. 509 reduces congestion. It's an alternate route and finds direct access to the airport and establishes the freight connections. There was a study done that was a provisory for the legislature to look at the freight mobility connections exit down to 167 and the Green River Valley, and we had a consultant, Marty Hefron, do that and we were all blown away by the amount of freight movement that came 509, and the standpoint is that 80% of the truck trips happen within a 50 mile radius, and what happens is you have the Duwamish, Port of Seattle industrial area, Green River Valley and then Ports of Tacoma and this facility fits right in the middle of it. It was the number 2 project statewide of Karen Schmitz, Strategic Investment Board. We've really clearly identified a benefit from it for the freight community. Prior to I-695, we had $50 million from the Strategic Investment Board for the project. Those dollars went away with I-695 but we've remained there on their priority listing, from a statewide standpoint (the freight and the state economy), so there's a freight component to it. Six months ago it was congestion relief, now all our conversations are economic stimulus and how fast we can get things out,how we can get projects out not only for the construction of the jobs built but also support the investments that we're making to the state economy. We have a new . facility of 509 from Burien down the ls`Avenue South bridge that we want to connect to and we basically take almost 2/3rds of a lane of traffic off of I-5 as we start balancing between I-5 and the South Center hill. Regionally, you get about a 13-15 minute reduction from Seattle to Tacoma, You say, well, that's not a lot. You take that and multiply that by 100,000, it's a huge number as far as travel plan benefits. You've got freight corridors. We also have an opportunity for direct HOV connection. I-5 has the main line HOV lanes on the other side. This provides a direct connection around the 210`h area of SeaTac and goes down 509 to the Is`Avenue South bridge, so it's providing the bus and carpool connections to the corridor which then benefits Sound Transit running express bus routes from Pierce County directly to SeaTac. This provides them south access into the airport system. Looking at the GMA relationship, SeaTac being the urban center, Des Moines supporting their development and congestion, we have about three miles of right of way. We can use the initial right of way that we have. It used to go down through Des Moines and then towards Federal Way and we'd bring it over to 2101h. This is the preferred alternative. You have the south access link basically like the north access roadway to the airport. About 30% of the trips from SeaTac head to the south and towards South King, Pierce, and other points south. You've got the City of Kent with distributor roadways on I-5 rebuilding the 516 interchange and also then the 2281h extension and connectivity down to the valley, giving the alternate routes to get down in the Kent area off of 228`h, 516. Also you'll have an opportunity to go down 272"a, and come down in the valley that way. There are three additional lanes on 1-5. That is in addition to the lanes HOV lanes that are out there now on 1-5. And then we have the section going down from 272"a down to 320`h. This is a visualization of what it would look like from the south looking north off of 1-5 going underneath I-5, underneath Highway 99 into a new interchange 20-20 being able to go into the south access to the airport, continuing across and then tying into existing 509 at that point. Council Workshop, 11/20/01 8 Kent specifics: connectivity at 228`h and obviously the freight movements. I don't know if this is true . or not but I'm told the Green River valley is either the 41h or 61h biggest warehouse distribution center in the country. We have showed about a third of the trips coming off of 509 is because those from I-5 actually want to go down into the Green River valley itself. 228`' helps us be able to accommodate those trips down in the valley from 509. 228`' also helps the 516 interchange because without it then we get a loading at 516 interchange. It really becomes unacceptable. Then we have to go to alternate design configurations there. This being a state highway coming down the Kent-Des Moines Road, this is a configuration that works because you tend to balance the flow going down into the valley. Without 228`h the project does stand but we may have to look more specifically at how we will design this particular area. But it's clear from the state standpoint, the Freight Mobility Investment Board, that for the City of Kent, this is a good connection and there's a logic to building a network system. I-5 in this area will have distributor roadways which will be barrier separated roadways that get off to go to 509 and come back on. So those weave movements between there and 516 are happening off the I-5 mainline. As you come down here, you basically come down off ramps southbound and there will be a signal here at 2281h and this is basically what we would follow up. A sense of split dime interchange and so you have ramps here or here you can either take a left go down to 228`h and come straight down here, take a right over here or take a left way down to 516. Same thing northbound, come off here take a right to come down in the valley, left to go towards Midway, continue through and be able to take a right to go down 228`h also. What happens is you have a distribution of volumes, so instead of all the loading we have here, we're able to split it and then you can make some . of these movements again. The total package we're talking about is $681 million (current estimate on the project). How can we get to that point? Cost benefit ratio—we had our consultant run through this new information and it ran 6 to 1, 8 to 1. From an economic standpoint, it was saying the investment was long overdue. The money is there to move forward on this. For 405 and other projects we're hovering around 2 to 1 for a cost benefit ratio as a project. We feel from that standpoint it is an investment that does make sense and from the environmental standpoint, we're doing a lot in the Des Moines Creek Basin. We're doing some wetlands and parks, improving fish passages in stream conditions and this might be a good point for me to step a little bit back. I've been working on the 509 project for a number of years. When Secretary Doug McDonald came in from the Boston area to the department about April and started looking at our program and what's being talked about,because we were into this session of the public legislature to move forward on possible statewide funding and went into three special sessions, at that point he was looking at what the program would be over the next 10 years and identified that about half of the state's budget would go to about 4-5 major projects in the state, and the other half of our budget would go to about 1,400 other projects that we do,preservation, safety, things of that nature, and he realized that we need to focus on those major projects. So he actually created a new office, Urban Corridors Office, of which then I was asked to not only be the Director for the 509 project, but also 405,to put those forward. We've also in that group had the Alaskan Way viaduct and 520 trans lake projects and so we're saying how can we put those forward so that we can possible put them before the legislature and also possible a regional package that the legislator was talking about so the region can also look at funding of these major transportation projects. Council Workshop, 11/20/01 9 We have this combination that we're looking at from a financial standpoint in funding,but the interesting part on the environmental side is we're also trying to look at it with the Endangered Species Act and other aspects, looking at what we can do within the whole watershed basin and try and see what we can do not only as you typically do impacts and you have mitigations on projects, but to actually look at the Green River, Cedar River, and other watershed basins and try to combine those projects into packages that actually enhance the environment and, as an example, there's a project we have on 405 going on 167. About $85 million to stack some lanes to make that south Renton interchange work. We could take some of that money and go up to Howard Hansen Dam for $27 million and do a fish bypass which opens up a whole habitat area. So, we're getting into a lot of that and you may hear about some of those conversations. We're doing a similar thing with that with 509 in the Des Moines Creek Basin. This happens to be the Des Moines Creek area—a bridge when we open it up—we can get the outfall from a sewage plant out of the stream or other enhancements up and down the corridor. I think that's been a key as these projects go and it's kind of a new way we're trying to look at how we do the enhancement with environmental. With that comment about the environment, we actually have agency concurrence with Corps of Engineers—all their resource agencies including National Marines Fisheries, who has a charge over the Endangered Species Act— and so we actually we have this complete with preliminary alternatives. We're doing a proj ect level environmental document and we feel very confident in moving forward and have got a lot of good comments from the resource agencies. I want to mention that the draft EIS now is in review with the City of Kent and others. We still are looking at storm water design elements and construction staging, and that's going to be a key to anything being built on Interstate 5 corridor—property purchases, relocations. There is upward to 300 properties and 300 relocations on this project. Relocations are not necessarily to property because we have a lot of multi family up in the SeaTac area. Probably in the elements in the Midway interchange area and interest to Kent, I understand there's conversations with Poulsbo RV because there would be some impacts in securing funding for the project. This (getting into our environmental) moving forward when funding becomes available. We're looking at scenarios up to 2010 and also at scenarios to 2007 for construction, depending on how they fund this. If they do as one package, we can do a lot faster and spread the funding out over time,we have to phase the project. There is some conversation right now about bonding the whole project. It's being strategized. This is a brochure that we're using and might give you a little bit more information. It is clear, though, as I mentioned, that getting consensus on the project or the vision, having the communities, the jurisdictions to support this, and having that type of legislative interaction is something that I do see in the horizon as out there. We've been able to work well with the jurisdictions and having Kent's interest in this is very much appreciated. Councilmember Connie Epperly—What is the timeline on the 228`h if we go ahead with it—does it kind of follow the same as the 509? Tim LaPorte—We think we're faster than the state. Assuming council gives us the authorization to move ahead into the permitting phase, it would probably take us about two years to get through the permitting phase. We have about two acres of wetlands so the Corp permit would probably be the most lengthy permit and we have to do a biological assessment on it. We have had meetings with the various consultants with the permitting agencies and there are no fatal clauses that were mentioned. They like the higher level bridge as we described similar to the Don E. Wickstrom Bridge. It has less an impact on the river crossing, which is clearly the most sensitive, so at this point, we are not aware of any environmental fatal clause. It is an old gravel pit and we do intend to be sensitive to the environment. However, it appears to be fairly doable from an Council Workshop, 11/20/01 10 environmental point of view. So, that being the case, most of the delays that we have seen on 1861h and 277th were really environmental related. The right of way for 2281h corridor is largely owned by the City of Seattle and they want to do a swap with us so they are very motivated. There are very few parcels that we need to acquire which avoids the one to two year combination of periods. I would say probably 2005 we should be able to start. Connie Epperly—We should be in construction? So our's would be completed just a little bit before? Tim LaPorte—Correct. And we took that into account with our EIS and we have coordinated with the state. We would be making some minor improvements to the 516 interchange right at the bottom including the five lanes of Military Road(which is our project) and the right turn lanes. Our project has a new kind of functional utility. It has that litmus test under SEPA law and we are presuming that we would be ahead of the state. We want to help them move right behind us. It seems to be a very logical construction sequence. Connie Epperly—And with us going ahead with the 228 h Corridor and all of the improvements that would help your case on the 509. Tim LaPorte—Yes. Craig Stone- It helps, the connectivity and the freight, and it helps having Kent being a partner. We're looking at staging and we have a situation up north where we're going underneath the SeaTac approach. We can get that right of way pretty quickly. Along I-5, we do have some of the apartments through there, single family, some of the commercial components,but it's still not our big right of way time consuming area. So what `s really consuming for us is getting from here over to 99 where we have a lot and a mobile home park and the Port of Seattle. That's going to be a time consuming area for right of way. We're most constrained by right of way time in our schedule. We've talked about doing the first segment, get it under construction, and doing the I-5 also as one of the earlier segments, and then continuing to purchase right of way, then have the last construction being this middle segment through here. So that may be something we can coordinate a little more and interchange with 2281h. If you do this outside roadways and the ramps down into 516, we would also then coordinate this with our HOV project which we're going to rebuild through here. Even without 509, it's going to be a huge benefit to I-5 because all of a sudden, you're getting those movements, getting out of the main line of traffic flow. There's a good opportunity for us there. The meeting adjourned at 6:13 PM.