The Washington Department of Transportation has an important decision to make soon regarding Spokane’s partially-built North-South Freeway. There’s an area of contaminated soil near where the proposed route for the last half of the freeway will run. But plans for its cleanup are still in limbo. So the agency has a tough decision: stay with plan A or pivot to plan B.
When the agency's regional administrator, Mike Gribner, appeared before the Senate Transportation Committee this week, he started with the good news about the freeway.
“The north half is complete," Gribner said. "There’s been three interchanges built, 28 bridges built, one nationally-recognized railroad tunnel.”
The remaining five miles of the project, from Francis Avenue to Interstate 90, is well into the planning phase and money is set aside for it. The legislature has allocated almost $900 million to finish the freeway during the next 12 years. That was from the Connecting Washington transportation package approved two years ago.
But there’s a big challenge ahead.
Gribner’s team has picked a route through east Spokane where the freeway will go. The problem is it passes through an area contaminated by years of oil leaks at a fueling depot operated by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. That’s near Market Street, a few blocks south of Wellesley.
“And so, as we understand the spill right now, there are two major columns that have penetrated 170 feet of soil depth and now sit on top of the sole source aquifer,” he said.
“I would characterize it as approximately seven acres of free product that is intermixing with our aquifer,” said Jeremy Schmidt, an environmental engineer for the Washington Department of Ecology.
Schmidt says it’s not an emergency area where wells are drawing drinking water and it doesn’t appear to be spreading. But it is an environmental hazard that needs to be taken care of.
Here’s Gribner’s dilemma. Ecology is working with the railroad and Marathon Oil (the two potentially liable partners) to figure out when the cleanup will be done and how much it will cost. But the resolution isn’t certain.
“We’re sitting there with a funded project that needs to start pretty soon," Gribner said. "We’re debating can we stay in this long enough for them to settle it and leave the alignment there or do we need to go to the alternate alignment?”
That alternate alignment would move part of the freeway about 30 feet to the west.
“It makes the freeway 30 feet higher and the local neighborhoods don’t like that. And they’ve been very vocal about the fact that they don’t like that,” he said.
Gribner says he would prefer to stay with the original alignment for the rest of the freeway, but “we may actually have to take on the tougher alignment at some point to advance, to start spending the Connecting Washington money. That is likely going to be a very unpopular decision locally, with the neighborhoods,” he said.
The new alignment would add some structures to elevate the freeway in places. He says that would add $20-to-25 million to the project.
Gribner had hoped his agency would have made that decision by now so that construction on the freeway could resume by 2019. “To be honest, we may be a couple months past where I’m really comfortable with it.”
But he’s still hoping for a resolution to the clean up, knowing that he can really only hold out another four-to-six weeks before he has to commit himself and pick the alignment for the rest of the North-South Freeway.