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closeFunds dwindle as Sumner roads crumble
The city of Sumner struggles to find funding sources for its arterial roads,
Roxanne Cooke
If Bill Shoemaker could go back in time, he would probably build Sumner roads differently to account for the 2,800 big rigs that now pass over Sumner’s asphalt on a daily basis.
Shoemaker, the public works director of Sumner, said that if roads such as Fryar Avenue and East Valley Highway were built strong enough in the first place, they could handle the brunt of long-haul trucks.
“Just build them right the first time,” he said.
In addition to the few thousand big rigs that drive in and out of Sumner each day, the industrial area generating that truck traffic provides approximately 7,200 jobs. Yet the area provides very little sales tax revenue to the city, which could go toward road repairs and reconstruction of roads.
City officials see the industrial part of town as a valuable resource — one that extends past the city limits into ports and neighboring cities and counties. But some of the city’s arterial roads are suffering from the weight and volume of long-haul trucks, and officials struggle to provide adequate funding for maintenance and repairs because the cost to run the city goes up each year, while revenues have not kept up.
Major arterials that currently take on the freight burden include East Valley Highway, West Valley Highway, Puyallup Street, 142nd Avenue and Fryar Avenue, Shoemaker said. East Valley Highway has undergone many repairs, but is still in poor condition, while West Valley Highway has been almost entirely rebuilt.
The price for repairs and reconstruction is high — West Valley cost roughly $4 million and was funded by Transportation Improvement Board grants, said City Engineer Mike Dahlem. It will likely cost between $250,000 and $300,000 to fix Fryar Avenue, but a grant for that construction has not been awarded, though it has been applied for multiple times in the last few years.
“Infrastructure is a huge financial cost,” said Deputy City Administrator Diane Supler. “Our money doesn’t go as far as we’d like it to go.”
Grants are necessary for arterial work because the money allocated to local street repair and maintenance just isn’t enough to cover everything, Dahlem said.
“We don’t budget enough money to maintain the (arterial) roads today,” he said.
This year’s budget allocates $890,000 to local street repair and general maintenance, Supler said. That money comes from utility, property and sales taxes as well as the city’s portion of the gas tax. State and federal grants, impact fees and the real estate excise tax are the primary sources for work done on arterial roads.
This year, the city of Sumner is spending approximately $50,000 to replace manhole covers along 142nd Avenue, which is one of the major truck routes in Sumner, Shoemaker said.
“(The trucks) just tear them up,” he said.
Manhole covers are just one example of the damage that big rigs cause over time. One 18-wheeler semi is roughly equivalent to 108 regular cars, Shoemaker said. That number can be as high as 150, depending on the specific truck and its load.
Public works uses a pavement rating scale to rank a road’s pavement condition, Shoemaker said. It runs from zero to 100, with 100 being “excellent” condition. The department tries to maintain a standard of 80 or higher for the city’s roads.
The average rating of all roads in Sumner is 80.4, according to a report prepared by Dahlem that was presented to the Sumner City Council earlier this year. That number is elevated, though, because the city has constructed 13 miles of new roads in the last 10 years.
Some older streets in the city that take the weight of long-haul trucks are still in very poor condition. For example, a portion of Fryar Avenue is ranked as “poor,” or between 41 and 55 on the pavement rating scale, according to Dahlem’s report. Part of East Valley Highway falls between 26 and 40 on the scale. A section of Puyallup Street is categorized as “part failed” — between 11 and 25.
It’s important that roads are kept in good condition to maintain a smooth driving surface and to protect utilities beneath the road, Dahlem said. It is also less expensive to the city to maintain roads than to be forced to do major repairs or reconstruction after years of doing little or nothing.
“There’s no economy in letting them go down the drain,” said Sumner Mayor Dave Enslow. “They’re not a cheap fix. They’re an expensive fix.”
Most roads are designed for a 20-year pavement life, but that lifespan can be extended if maintenance work is conducted starting in the eighth or 10th year of the road’s life, Dahlem said. In order to maintain a pavement rating of 80 or higher, a Maintenance, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction program would help to keep maintenance and repair costs low. However, it would require an additional $1.3 million from the city in the first year — and that cost would increase over time.
“That’s what it would take to keep the roads in the shape they are today,” Dahlem said.
The need for routine maintenance is clear to city officials in and outside of Sumner — that’s why Enslow and the other mayors that make up the Valley Cities Association, a group of cities that sit alongside Highway 167, are urging the Puget Sound Regional Council to consider the infrastructure needs of their cities. The PSRC is a regional planning body that develops policies, makes decisions and doles out funds for transportation projects, growth management and economic development.
The Valley Cities Association recently sent a letter to the PSRC requesting that a large portion of any federal transportation funds provided to the region is put into maintaining regional freight routes.
Funding for transportation has been reduced by legislation and initiatives, according to the letter. It mentions Initiative 776, which was approved in 2002 and repealed a $15 local option vehicle excise tax and caused significant losses to city street programs.
“For several years the Valley Cities have been reviewing the condition of our designated truck routes that are falling into disrepair,” the letter reads. “In several cases our lack of revenues have resulted in closures to freight traffic as we have witnessed the revenues that we traditionally used to maintain our arterial system decrease while the costs of performing such work continues to escalate.”
For example, Valley Avenue was closed off as a truck route in the last five years, Shoemaker said. The Stuck River Bridge will soon be closed to long-haul trucks because it can no longer handle more than 31 tons — most similar bridges can handle at least 35.
When the city closes off specific roads to trucks, those truckers must find a new route, which often takes longer and uses more gas, Enslow said. It may also slow down the service of a business.
“It obviously causes a deterrent to meet the customers’ needs, but we reroute,” said Fred Dehnert, a dispatcher for Freight Taxi Inc., an industrial-area freight delivery business on 142nd Street.
Dehnert said Freight Taxi hasn’t had any problems with 142nd Street, which has portions rated “good” and others rated “excellent” on the pavement rating scale. Freight Taxi’s trucks regularly take 142nd to the 24th Street Interchange to access Highway 167.
The interchange and the Puyallup Street extension are two completed projects that were part of a longtime plan to keep trucks outside of Sumner’s downtown and residential areas, Shoemaker said. The idea is to have the roads around the industrial area built or reconstructed to specifically serve long-haul trucks.
Along with the access the 24th Street Interchange provides to the industrial area of Sumner, the character of that area is changing, Enslow said. City officials are pushing toward more retail, including forthcoming hotels and the new Mustard Seed Deli.
There’s also a drive to recruit “big box” retail stores, like Costco, to that area, Enslow said. The purpose is to provide more sales tax revenue to the city — revenue that could help fund street repairs.
But he believes more needs to be done, which is why the Valley Cities Association sent its letter to the PSRC. The mayors are requesting that PSRC incorporate their map of “freight routes of regional significance” into Destination 2030, the long-range transportation plan for the region. These routes include roads with a high percentage of freight traffic, such as 142nd, East Valley and West Valley highways.
Another option for the city is to have the industrial area designated as an employment or industrial center, which would give it higher priority in terms of funding, Shoemaker said. The process to receive that designation is lengthy, but city officials are considering it.
Sumner officials are also working on applying for grants for overlay work on Fryar Avenue, Shoemaker said. Plans to take the Stuck River Bridge off the truck route are underway and the MR&R program is an option that will be revisited at a later date.
Officials hope to bring attention to the disrepair of freight routes, but if little or nothing can be done, the toll will be a high price: crumbling roads and increasing costs to repair them.
“The day’ll come,” Shoemaker said. “That’ll be real money.”
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STREETS BY THE NUMBERS
> 30 percent of cities in Washington rate the overall condition of their streets as poor, very poor or failing.
> 32 percent of cities in Washington have identified potentially unsafe street conditions that cannot be addressed with existing resources.
> 79 percent of cities in Washington indicate that state grants are among the top three most critical funding sources for street improvements and new construction.
Source: Association of Washington Cities, State of the Cities 2008 Executive Summary
STREET DEFINITIONS
> Residential roads: Provide access to abutting properties
> Arterial roads: Provide travel between communities
> Collector roads: Connect residential to arterial roads
> Maintenance: Actions to maintain existing quality of street, including crack sealing, patching and chip/fog sealing
> Rehabilitation: Work to improve quality of street, including overlays and flexible pavements
> Reconstruction: Complete rebuilding of existing pavement
Source: Sumner Public Works department