WSDOT seeks a friendly ear at Rotary

Meeting with ML club unveils the trials and tribulations of caring for aging roads in era of heavy traffic and small budgets

The road to better roads is a bumpy path for the Washington Department of Transportation.

Shrinking tax revenues have forced many heavily trafficked areas to wait for repairs. This, compounded by the aging of the main highways of the state creates what some are calling a point of crisis for Washington roads.

In a community flanked by State Route 17 and Interstate 90, these concerns take on a more vivid tone, as small cars have to share the narrow roads and worn highways with pickup trucks, which in turn have to share it with semi trucks.

Members of the noon Rotary Club of Moses Lake aired some of the community's concerns with Doug MacDonald, the state's Secretary of Transportation, and Donald Senn, the WSDOT administrator for the North Central Region, during the organization's weekly meeting Wednesday.

Despite the troublesome shape of some roadways, MacDonald said that people should travel to places like Montana and Idaho. The outcome of such trips, he said, would be an increased sense of pride over the state of Washington roads.

Instead, he said, people tend to take the roads, particularly the interstate highways, for granted. This is troublesome, especially after decades of good highways have given way to overused, cracking concrete with little money left for repairs.

"There is a list of projects," he said. "But we are not going to do them until the citizens tell us they can take on a larger lift."

The lift he refers to is a larger amount of taxes, whose revenue may be directed towards the WSDOT's projects, some of which, like the replacement of Potato Hill Road cross over Interstate 90, affect Moses Lake.

The Potato Hill Road overpass is too low for many trucks traveling on I-90, McDonald said, forcing them to take a 40-mile detour. The project to improve the bridge was set to begin in the spring of this year.

Other roads have not been as lucky.

"It's unacceptable that Highway 17 is not on the short list of projects," said Harlan Beagley, a Rotary Club member, and the Herald's publisher. "It's not a question of whether somebody is going to die on Highway 17; it's a question of who."

Beagley defended the need for an extra lane on Highway 17 by noting the importance of the roadway, which runs straight through Grant County, to the agricultural commerce of the state and the nation.

"Grant County is, by yield per acre, the number-one potato producer in the nation," he said. "It outpaced Yakima Valley as number-one agricultural county in the state."

All this, Beagley said, translates into a large amount of produce and equipment traveling by truck on Highway 17, the same road used by residents to commute from one town to the other.

MacDonald said that the Highway 17 project was indeed among those unofficially earmarked to become a reality. However, he said, there was no money to do the projects and the WSDOT had to shrink the list.

"You need that road, we need the tax money to deliver it to you," MacDonald said.

The priorities are determined in two ways, MacDonald said. Engineering formulas considering the traffic flow, the amount of repairs through the years, and the number of accidents. A second factor is how effectively the area the road is on is represented in Olympia.

"Their (WSDOT) priorities are out of whack," retorted Beagley. "They are removing rocks from I-90 between Spokane and Moses Lake and installing guard rails." These tasks, he said, cost much more than the $11 million estimated to improve Highway 17.

MacDonald defended the work on the aging east-west highway saying that on its concrete travel not just trucks "with DVDs to Chicago" but every single commodity people in this state depend on. Besides, the highway's advanced age has brought it to what he described as "the crisis stage."

"It's getting old and breaking down," Senn said. MacDonald agreed, saying that the concrete on I-90 has a life expectancy of between 40 to 50 years. The highway was built in the 1960s.

"We have got a big problem" MacDonald said, although he and Senn maintained his optimism to a point. Senn said the key was to use the money wisely before the eyes of the constituents and the legislators.

"We have got to do better with the dollars we have," MacDonald said.