Bart Gernhart, with the Washington State Department of Transportation, discusses a proposed project to add more collective distributor lanes to Interstate 5 with the North Lewis County Industrial Access steering committee on Thursday in Chehalis.
As a steering committee worked to finalize a report detailing ways to improve industrial access to local areas, officials from the state Department of Transportation warned the committee’s preferred option of constructing more collector distributor lanes on Interstate 5 would be an expensive project that would feature negative trade-offs.
The North Lewis County Industrial Access steering committee decided in May that additional collector distributor lanes like the ones recently constructed between Harrison Avenue and Mellen Street in Centralia were a better option than building a new interchange near the Lewis and Thurston county line.
“I want to let you know early on that it seems like it’s a pretty expensive solution,” Bart Gernhart, with WSDOT, told committee members on Thursday.
The collector distributor lanes added to Interstate 5 between Mellen and Harrison Avenue cost about $100 million, he said. WSDOT looked at CD lanes that would have stretched further, but the project was not feasible at the time.
Gernhart said he didn’t want to “shut the door” on the proposal, adding there’s a lot of value and positive aspects to the proposed project, but he said “some trade-offs are not all that positive.”
“I wanted to put the reality back to it,” he said. “I’m willing to sit down and go through the process, but we don’t have a ton of money.”
He said adding CD lanes that would stretch to Reynolds Avenue would decrease local access or exits, and could also interfere with other projects like Centralia Station, a 43-acre development near the Mellen Street interchange which is eyeing Fred Meyer as its anchor tenant.
Thera Black, with SCJ Alliance, a consulting firm tasked with the analysis, told committee members at the May meeting that the proposed project did not mean the Department of Transportation or the Federal Highway Administration would approve of the project.
“The concept as presented is just the very, very first step in a long process if this is to move forward,” she said on Thursday.
Gernhart said discussions would continue, but he said right now the project seems premature since funding for something of this size would not be available until 2025. At that point, the people involved in the discussions would likely be different, he said.
“It’s on the edge of wasting the taxpayer’s money if you start too soon,” he said. “… It’s good to have the conversations now, but the earlier you do it, the more likely things will change.”
Erik Martin, the public works director for Lewis County, said it is important to ensure those discussions continue moving forward.
“This needs to have a continued life or it’s just going to be another dusty plan on the shelf, which was never the intent,” he said.
Black will work to incorporate some of the committee’s recommendations into the final report before it is released to the public. The committee, or some form of it, plans to reconvene annually, and maybe more frequently, to analyze ways to improve industrial access to Lewis and South Thurston county.
The North Lewis County Industrial Access project evaluated around 80 measures that aimed to provide better industrial access, improve the transportation system and add 1,000 new jobs to the area by 2030.
The final report, and corresponding technical document, will outline which options were eliminated and why.
