Moses Lake council talks traffic safety, adopts road plan

MOSES LAKE — The Moses Lake City Council spent much of its regular Tuesday meeting talking about both the current conditions and future plans for the city’s streets.

“Skyline Drive has turned into a racetrack,” resident Rich Swanson told council members during a citizens comment period at the beginning of the meeting.

Swanson asked council members to consider installing speed bumps on Skyline Drive and turn the intersection of Skyline Drive and State Avenue into a three-way stop, which he said a number of motorists are using to bypass Pioneer Way and were driving way too fast down the quiet residential street, putting residents at risk.

“Let’s do something that does work,” he said. “Speed bumps work, they make the traffic manageable and it’s safe.”

Swanson noted that towns as varied as Sedona, Ariz., and Anchorage, Alaska, use speed bumps to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods, and Anchorage is able to do so despite needing to plow streets in the winter.

“That neighborhood is getting younger,” said Council Member Deanna Martinez, who noted she is one of Swanson’s neighbors. “There are a lot more kids.”

Council Member Dustin Swartz admitted he’s used Skyline Drive as a shortcut, and said the lack of stop signs between Nelson Road and Hill Avenue makes it too tempting to drive fast along that stretch of city street.

“I understand it totally. We should at least start with a stop sign to stop people like me, and I encourage the city to look at it sooner rather than later,” Swartz said.

City Manager Allison Williams said there are a number of areas in Moses Lake where traffic calming — the name traffic planners and engineers give to measures like speed bumps to slow vehicles down — could be considered.

“Traffic calming can be a component of traffic planning,” Williams said. “We need to put that in our (traffic) plan.”

City Engineer Richard Law said there are a number of things traffic planners and engineers can do to slow traffic down on a street, but the only things that have lasting effects are removing lanes and narrowing streets. For example, Law said, when Third Avenue downtown was narrowed from four lanes to two, on-street parking was added and traffic lights removed, the average speed downtown went from 10-15 miles per hour over the speed limit to less than 20 miles per hour now.

“These narrow streets tend to keep speeds lower,” Law said.

However, Martinez noted that even with the narrowing of Division Street from four lanes to three, motorists are now driving faster along that road again and it is harder to make left and right turns onto Division.

When asked by Council Member Judy Madewell if the Moses Lake Police Department could do some traffic enforcement on Skyline Drive, Police Chief Kevin Fuhr said the department will not have dedicated traffic officers on staff until next year and his staff is currently stretched thin.

“I have officers responding to 60-80 calls per day, so finding the time will be difficult,” he said.

Council members also unanimously approved the city’s six-year road plan, which among other things includes a proposal to build a sidewalk along Nelson Road to give kids a safer walking path to Groff Elementary School, an extension on Yonezawa Boulevard east of S.R. 17 to Moses Lake Avenue, and safety improvements to the intersection of Wheeler Road and Road L NE — all of which the city hopes to find funding for in 2023 or 2024.

The goal of the plan is to have projects the city can then apply for state and federal grant funding.

However, the greatest concern was about the lack of a safe walking path along Nelson Avenue for kids going to both Groff Elementary School and the Moses Lake Christian Academy, both of which are located on Moses Lake Avenue south of Nelson Road. MLCA teacher Donna Hamar said walking along Nelson Road is a huge risk for kids, since there is no proper crosswalk, no walking path and only a ditch along the south side of Nelson.

“It’s very dangerous on Nelson,” Hamar said during a public hearing on the traffic plan.

Law said the city is going to put up flashing crosswalk beacons on Nelson Road by fall and has applied for a grant under the Washington State Department of Transportation’s Safe Routes to School program to pay for the walking path. But that funding would not likely be available until 2023 at the earliest, Law said, and a simple, temporary asphalt walking path might cost as much as $100,000 in the current inflation-plagued economy.

“That’s a long time,” said Mayor Dean Hankins.

Martinez said the city should work with the Moses Lake School District to create a temporary safer walking path along Nelson road for students as the city works through the grant process.

Jim Warjone, an attorney representing developer and landowner ASPI Group, said the city also needs to put a possible downtown bypass, such as a proposal to use Hiawatha Road and build a bridge across Moses Lake that would give heavy truck traffic access to the industrial areas at the Port of Moses Lake without having to go through town, on the traffic plan.

“There may be some different funding options,” Warjone told council members. “We need to be looking at ways to get traffic out of town.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com