Seven stretches of road on Vashon Island could be closed in the next 25 years if the King County Road Services’ Divison does not find a way to increase revenue.
The seven stretches are among the department’s 35 bridges and 72 miles of roadway county-wide that are at risk of being closed by 2040. The Road Services Division’s new Bridges and Roads Task Force has been meeting for the past six months and on Wednesday released its recommendations for the department on how to deal with the crisis. Among the task force’s recommendations was initiating “a new county-wide revenue tool … that is tied to inflation, sustainable, long-term, provides a benefit to cities and the county and is not regressive.”
County and state transportation departments lost millions of dollars in revenue after Tim Eyman’s Initiative 695 was passed in 1999 and did away with the state’s car excise tax (car tab tax). One decade after the initiative’s passing, the Kitsap Sun reported that Tim Eyman said I-695 had saved vehicle owners more than $10 billion.
That money savings for Washington residents translates into shortages for transit throughout the state. The Road Services Division’s task force report states that managing the county’s existing infrastructure would require $350 million every year. Currently, the county has about $100 million in revenue for the upkeep of county roads and bridges.
“(The department has) enough funding to address immediate safety issues, clean water requirements (runoff) and a modest amount of maintenance and preservation activities,” the task force report states.
But it’s not enough funding to save the aforementioned stretches of road and 35 bridges. On Vashon, affected roads would be:
• Crescent Drive SW between Westside Highway and SW Cove Road
• Westside Highway SW between the two intersections with Crescent Drive SW
• The Dockton Road seawall between SW Ellisport Road and Portage Way SW
• The Quartermaster Drive seawall from just east of Monument Road SW to Dockton Road SW
• Kingsbury Beach Road between SW 234 Street and 80th Avenue SW
• Governor’s Lane from 99th Avenue SW to 96th Avenue SW
• The Vashon Highway seawall from 115th Avenue SW to SW 240th Place in Magnolia Beach.
All of the roads are in the county’s transportation needs report and are due for reconstruction measures, but King County Road Services Division Director Brenda Bauer said last week that the department does not have the funds to repair them.
“We don’t have enough money to do the maintenance and preservation on all roads. We have to handle the heavier traffic roads first,” Bauer said. “If we can’t make (roads) safe, we’re closing them.”
Under the county roads division’s system, roads are placed in one of five tiers based on how heavily traveled they are. Safety and regulatory measures are required on all roads, regardless of tier, but maintenance (potholes, re-striping) are performed on more heavily traveled roads first. The closer to the number one tier the road is, the harder the department will try to keep it maintained and open. On the island, Vashon Highway is the only tier-one road.
Bauer said the number of potential closures just inventory the “known knowns.” The numbers don’t account for any possible future damage by flood, earthquake or landslide that may render roads or bridges unsafe.
“We’ve already had to close three bridges (not part of the 35),” Bauer said. “We have no money for capital improvements. Many of the county’s roads were built more than 100 years ago and were just log roads. They’d put logs down and roll cars over. Gradually, those logs were filled in with gravel and then covered with asphalt, so the road base falls apart and is not substantial. Repairs to the road base need to be done, and that is extraordinarily expensive.”
The county roads division is responsible for all of the unincorporated county roads and only collects tax revenue from those living in unincorporated areas. Of King County’s 2 million residents, 250,000 live in the unincorporated areas of the county, which include Skykomish, Vashon Island, North Bend and Enumclaw. The county’s website reports that unincorporated areas cover 82 percent of King County’s land area, but now contain less than 20 percent of King County’s population.
“King County is driving the economic engine of the state,” Bauer said. “Everyone is coming to Seattle, and there’s a lot of out-of-county drivers. Most other counties don’t have this problem because about 40 percent live in unincorporated areas.”
She said that the county cannot ask the 250,000 unincorporated residents to carry the road tax burden of the 2 million people in the county, so a solution will have to come in the form of a regional tax.
The task force’s full report can be read online on the King County Road Services Division’s website: kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/roads.aspx.
