According to Edmonds streets manager Tod Moles, crews so far have used 2,000 gallons of anti-ice, 80 yards of sand and 130 man-hours to prepare for predicted snow and ice. “We will continue to monitor and adjust our response according to what Mother Nature throws at us,” Moles said Tuesday. “We stated our morning with wet pavement, but in just a matter of minutes our parking lot here at public works turned white.”

“We have already planned our crew schedules for the next two day making sure we have people available for a 24-hours response,” Moles added. “It’s really the only way to cover an event like this. Our guys are in good shape and ready for the worst, hoping for the best.”

His advice for residents: ‘If you don’t have to drive….DON’T. It can look like there is nothing at your house, and two blocks away, it’s a white out. Conditions are very fluid and predicting what the roads will be like to travel is impossible.”

According to Moles, so far the city has had to close only one road during the most recent snow and ice –  the steep hill at 172nd and Olympic View Drive. “We have one truck out currently and we are going through our gear prepping for the next wave,” he said. The city’s snow route maps have been recently updated and citizens should check them, he said. You can find a link to those maps here.

“I encourage people to be aware of their vehicles ability to navigate these conditions, check their tire tread conditions and stay off the roads if at all possible,” Moles said.

Motorists are advised to plan their trips carefully by allowing ample time to reach their destination, plan for rest stops along the way, obey the posted speed limit, and make sure everyone in the vehicle is properly restrained.

Watching the weather forecast and checking the conditions of the roads before you set out will save you time and frustration. Also make sure your vehicle is prepared for the bad weather.

“Now through the end of the year is the period when we see a noticeable increase in the number of impaired drivers on our roads,” Washington State Patrol District 7 Captain Jeffrey Sass said.  “Troopers will be keeping a sharp eye out for impaired drivers.  For those who don’t comply, we’re going to be out there, and you will be arrested.”

Motorists are reminded that they can immediately report dangerous drivers by dialing 911.

Sound Transit reports that it has canceled its Northline Sounder service between Seattle and Everett Wednesday evening due to mudslides.

Seattle-to-Edmonds commuters can board charter buses at 4th Avenue South and South Jackson Street at 4:05 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. Riders may also board regularly scheduled Community Transit Route 416 at 5th and James.

This weekend’s special event trains to the Apple Cup and Seahawk games will operate if no additional mudslides occur, Sound Transit said.

During this closure, ferry traffic will be rerouted from the upper holding lanes, using Dayton and Railroad avenues. Vehicles more than 50 feet long can’t load or offload during the Main Street closure. Larger vehicles should use the Seattle/Bainbridge route during this time.

Customers can expect delays, and pedestrians should look for special access during this closure. 

Burlington Northern railroad staff have requested the use of the parking portion of Bracketts Landing Park located north of the ferry dock from approximately Oct. 27-Nov. 23, to stage materials and equipment for the project. The closure will apply only to parked vehicles; the railroad says it will strive to keep pedestrian access open at all times.

Unforeseen conditions or inclement weather may extend the completion date. The project will have flaggers present between 6 a.m.-5 p.m. but those hours could be extended as construction efforts indicate. It will involve night work on as many as 14 nights — see attached preliminary schedule here — to avoid interference with ferry and rail traffic.

Ferry commuters should check with Washington State Ferries for any change to the routes.

The Washington State Department of Transportation sent a reminder Friday that it is closing the southbound I-5 on-ramps from SR 525 and I-405 from Friday night to Monday morning, Sept. 23 through 26, while crews complete new on-ramps and connect them to the southbound lanes. Northbound I-405 drivers will be detoured to southbound I-5 via the 164th Street SE interchange. To avoid backups on this route, consider taking alternate routes like SR 522, SR 527, SR 524 and SR 104 to reach southbound I-5.

If you’re on southbound SR 525, you can take southbound SR 99 to 196th Street Southwest or 220th Street Southwest to reach southbound I-5, the DOT says. You can also reach southbound I-5 via Alderwood Mall Parkway and westbound 196th Street Southwest

The new on-ramps will open at 5 a.m. Monday, Sept. 26, but there will be more changes next week as well. A temporary traffic island will separate mainline I-5 traffic from on-ramp traffic and traffic exiting to 196th Street Southwest for five days while crews work to complete the new 196th Street Southwest off-ramp. “If you’re on southbound I-5 and need to exit to 196th Street SW, you’ll need to move into the right lane prior to the I-405 interchange to avoid missing the exit,” the DOT said.

The new off-ramp to 196th Street Southwest will be opened on Friday morning, Sept. 30. Visit the website to get an overview of what the change will look like, and check out the Snohomish County construction page for a detailed listing of ramp and road closures.

By the end of the month, drivers will use new on- and off-ramps designed to eliminate lane-weaving and reduce the risk of collisions.

Crews have been preparing and grading the north parking area and will be ready to pave the area in asphalt early next week as weather permits.  With the bus transit center and driveway already poured and nearing full strength, crews are forming and preparing the remaining sidewalks for the last concrete pour over the next two weeks.  The bus transit center shelters will be finished next week and landscaping will be ready for planting the following week. 

Lighting was installed in the south parking lot last weekend.  Decorative lighting along the platform will be installed after the project is completed. 

The project is on target to open in July, Sound Transit said. In early July, an opening date for the bus transit center and north parking lot will be identified.

For more information about the project, visit the Sound Transit website or contact Roger Iwata at roger.iwata@soundtransit.org or 206-689-4904.

The pedestrian detour to the sidewalk on the north side of Main Street  remains in place. Once the grading is finished for the new driveway leading to Main Street, the curbs, gutters and sidewalk can be formed and concrete poured.  The work is expected to be finished by the end of next week and the sidewalk should re-open the following week Sound Transit said.

Crews are preparing for the new bus passenger shelter installation and have poured the concrete bases this week.  Next week, the shelter frames will be assembled and will be ready for painting and finishing work.  A water main will be installed next week, then flushed and tested before it is ready to provide new water service to the site. 

For more information about the project, visit the Sound Transit website or contact Roger Iwata at roger.iwata@soundtransit.org or 206-689-4904.

The culprit is sluggish sales tax revenues in the Snohomish County, the transit agency said.

“The recession has taken a large toll on public agencies that rely on sales tax revenues,” said Community Transit CEO Joyce Eleanor. “While we expect sales tax revenues to climb slightly this year, we foresee a long, slow economic recovery.”

In 2007, before the recession began, Community Transit collected $76 million in sales tax revenue, its primary funding source. The past two years, sales tax collections have been stuck at about $62 million, Eleanor said. Community Transit collects a voter-approved 0.9 percent tax on retail sales in its Snohomish County service district, the maximum allowed by the state.

“These cuts are necessary to keep our agency sustainable, so that we can provide transportation for Snohomish County residents far into the future,” she said.

The 2012 service cut will equal about 80,000 hours of service, roughly the same amount of service that was cut in 2010.

“By this time next year we will have cut about a third of the service and about a third of the employees that we had at the beginning of 2010,” Eleanor said.

In the last three years, Community Transit has cut about $29 million in program and administrative expenses, raised fares twice, deferred projects and purchases, and cut service by 15 percent.

More than 100 positions have been eliminated at the agency so far due to budget cuts.

“We are making this announcement now so that we can involve the public in a conversation on how our service should be restructured,” Eleanor said. Read the full speech in the “Message from the CEO.”

On June 2, Community Transit will release to the public three alternatives for achieving the 20 percent cut. Two of those alternatives will focus on reducing the frequency of trips, while a third alternative will propose a complete restructuring of bus service in Snohomish County. At least one of the alternatives will restore a skeletal level of Sunday service, which will mean deeper cuts the rest of the week.

Details of the proposals will be available in June on the agency’s website. Throughout the month of June, the agency will take public comment on the alternatives at five community open house meetings and a dozen rider forums and bus ride-alongs.

On July 7, the Community Transit Board of Directors will hold a public hearing on the three alternatives. The board is expected to take action on a final service cut scenario in September. The cuts will take effect on Feb. 19, 2012.

In a memo sent last Thursday night to the entire Edmonds City Council, Committee Chairman Don Fiene listed four issues that he says have been a source of frustration for the committee in recent months. They include the council’s failure to prioritize the use of local Real Estate Excise Tax (REET) funds for infrastructure improvements and a lack of support for the recently rejected Transportation Benefit District measure that appeared on last November’s ballot.

“Our Edmonds transportation system is the only thing funded by our general fund that is used nearly every day by every citizens,” Fiene wrote. “It is an infrastructure valued at over $30 million according to the City’s GASB (Government Accounting Standards Board) report. Our public safety services depend on it, but our politicians have neglected it.”

This map (click for PDF version) depicts those street segments in Edmonds (marked in orange) that are in the worst condition and therefore most in need of paving. (Source: City of Edmonds TBD web page)

The city’s inability to fund paving projects for city streets has been a topic of concern raised at City Council meetings in recent years. Edmonds is currently on an 80-year cycle for street overlays, meaning that each street is scheduled to be repaved once every 80 years. (Ideally, arterial streets should be repaved every 15-20 years and residential streets every 25-35 years.) The city says that one-third of its total street system is rated “poor” or “severe” (see map). In fact, the lack of funds for street repair has forced city staff to get creative about overlays, using water utility funds as mitigation for street damage caused by already-planned water main replacements.

One reason for reduced street repair funding is slow home sales, which have meant fewer real estate excise tax revenues for City of Edmonds coffers. The city currently prioritizes its REET funds to favor parks maintenance, with the first $750,000 going to parks infrastructure and anything after that earmarked for transportation capital improvements. The economic downturn has meant no leftover REET money for streets, said Fiene, adding that the council has the ability to shift the allocation to benefit transportation projects, but so far has not done so.

Fiene, a former City of Edmonds assistant engineer who now works for the City of Bothell, said that nearly all other municipalities use REET revenue to fund street repairs. The city’s transportation infrastructure “is used daily by all our citizens, while parks is generally not,” Fiene wrote in his memo to the council. “Despite these facts, no one on the council supported this change in policy.”

According to Fiene, the council’s lack of action on REET funding left the committee with no choice but to recommend last November’s Transportation Benefit District (TBD) ballot measure, which voters defeated by a 70 percent margin.

In the email to council, Fiene said that the transportation committee had met with councilmembers “on several occasions in the year prior to the TBD vote, to discuss the city’s policy on transportation capital funding. We had recommended a reprioritization in regards to the distribution of REET funds. However, not a single member on the council was willing to change the current policy which places a higher priority on parks infrastructure than transportation infrastructure. We were finally given only one option, the ballot measure to address the transportation capital budget problem.”

Transportation Benefit Districts were created by the Washington State Legislature as an option for local governments to fund transportation improvements. The City of Edmonds formed its own district in 2008, with the Edmonds City Council acting as the district’s independent governing board. In 2009, the Edmonds TBD board authorized an annual $20 fee on vehicle license renewals within the City of Edmonds. On July 20, 2010, the board recommended asking voters in November whether to increase the TBD license fee by an additional $40, which would have raised $1 million annually for 37 street and sidewalk projects identified for possible funding. Then the TBD board, wearing its Edmonds City Council hat, voted 4-3 at the Aug. 3 council meeting to put the proposal — known as Proposition 1 — on the general election ballot.

While Proposition 1 would have addressed the backlog in street maintenance, critics expressed concern about having such a long list of projects in tough economic times, ranging from “traffic calming” to walkways. The No on Proposition 1 committee, led by Councilmember DJ Wilson, argued that supporters had not prioritized the list and also noted that because the fee was applied to everyone equally, it was a regressive tax for those on lower incomes.

The fact that one councilmember actively campaigned against the TBD proposal and that only one other Councilmember — Diane Buckshnis — showed strong support for it was another source of discouragement for the transportation committee, Fiene said. “We felt that we were left high and dry. There was no financial or political support to speak of (from councilmembers).”

Fiene’s email drew a sharply-worded response from Wilson, who told Fiene that the transportation committee “made absolutely no effort to work with council… you essentially told us what you wanted and appeared to believe that any deviation from that would be considered an offense. The manner with which the committee engaged the council regarding the TBD was not constructive. In fact, I would call it a text book case for how not to engage a legislative body,” Wilson said.

In a follow-up phone call with My Edmonds News Friday, Wilson said it was untrue that the council didn’t listen to the transportation committee: “At the end of the day we listened to the committee and we put a TBD funding proposal on the ballot and it failed miserably.” Wilson said he has in the past advocated that more money be allocated from REET funds to roads, and he also noted that Mayor Mike Cooper included $704,000 annually for street repairs as part of the levy proposal he sent to the council March 30. (Cooper did acknowledge, however, that that his proposed allocation is “less than half the annual need of $1.5 million/year” for streets.)

Buckshnis told My Edmonds News that she is “very disappointed and saddened” by the committee members’ resignation. “I personally attempted to do all I could to help the committee’s voice be heard,” Buckshnis said, adding that she will recommend that the council look at “a specialized levy that will address overlays.”

Council President Strom Peterson, who was one of four councilmembers voting to place Proposition 1 on the ballot, told Fiene he was “saddened but not shocked by the committee’s decision. I share in your frustration and also accept responsibility for not pushing harder on transportation issues.” According to Peterson, councilmembers are scheduled to meet as a Transportation Benefit District board on April 26, followed by a council meeting, and he intends at that time to introduce the idea of allocating more REET money to transportation capital improvements.

What’s next for the transportation committee itself, which is an advisory committee to the Mayor? Bertrand Haus, the City of Edmonds Transportation Engineer who provides the group with staff support, said that the eight-member committee has been operating with five members in recent months and was ready to advertise for additional members when the resignations occurred. While Fiene’s resignation memo on the committee’s behalf was addressed to  “Councilmembers, Mayor,” Edmonds Mayor Mike Cooper’s email wasn’t included in the original message, so Cooper hadn’t seen it until My Edmonds News inquired Friday about his plans to respond. As a result, Cooper said he wanted to research the issue before discussing the committee’s future.