SEQUIM — City staff will seek community input over three days for the South Sequim Complete Streets Project to design and construct a street connecting Ninth Avenue to Brown Road between Washington Street and U.S. Highway 101.
The collaborative meeting, or design charette, will run from Wednesday through Friday, starting with a kick-off meeting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Sequim Civic Center, 152 W. Cedar St.
Framework, a planning and public outreach consultant, will facilitate the conversations.
“This is a ground-floor approach,” City Engineer Matt Klontz said.
Previous discussions and long-term plans have identified Prairie Street as the planned connector street.
But that’s only the beginning, according to city staff.
Design concept
The project uses “Complete Street” principles that city staff said address full street design aspects for vehicles and pedestrians, safety, neighborhood aesthetics and utilities management that also can be used elsewhere in the city for other projects.
City staff said the three-day discussions will result in preliminary routing and concept designs for the road’s width, sidewalks, landscaping, bike lanes, street lights and stormwater management.
At the kick-off, Framework staffers will present information about South Sequim Avenue’s vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and its infrastructure before leading discussions on development concepts.
Discussions will continue Thursday and Friday with an open design session. Staff members will work to produce design concepts with community input. These sessions are open to the public at the former Sequim Administration Building, 226 N. Sequim Ave.
A full schedule of events for those two days will be available at the kick-off meeting. For more information, call Dave Nakagawara, project engineer, at 360-681-2479.
Prairie previously
Klontz said the idea to improve Prairie Street has been in place in some capacity with multiple city plans including the Transportation Master Plan, 6-year Capital Improvement Plan and its Comprehensive Plan.
Ninth Avenue has come up in recent city discussions because it is near the site of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s proposed medication-assisted treatment (MAT) facility. City staff said plans for a connector street predate the controversy over the proposed facility.
Klontz told the City Council in April 2018 that one of the reasons for the project is that West Washington Street is at capacity and drivers and pedestrians need an east-west alternative to take the pressure off.
Another reason for a connector street is to connect two Economic Opportunity Areas near U.S. Highway 101 that were created in the city’s updated 2015 Comprehensive Plan.
Klontz told council members that if a connector like Prairie Street wasn’t improved before an Economic Opportunity Area developed, then congestion could worsen on Washington Street.
Last September, the City Council unanimously declined a $1 million, 20-year loan from the state Public Works Board for pre-construction planning to improve Prairie Street.
Sequim’s Public Works director David Garlington said then that the contract required the city to provide 30 percent of the funds for construction on Prairie Street secured within the two-year loan draw period, which city staff estimated at about $1 million.
City staff and council members agreed to conduct public outreach using Real Estate Excise Tax and Transportation Benefit District funds.
Garlington said city staff urged discussion because it is “a good, viable project” with “a lot of interest in it, and a lot of concerns from the community.”
“Washington Street is very busy,” Garlington said last September. “We’d like to take some of the pressure of that and facilitate movement similarly on Cedar, Fir and Spruce (streets) north off Washington.”
For more information about the City of Sequim, visit www.sequim wa.gov or call 360-683-4908.
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Matthew Nash is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. Reach him at mnash@sequimgazette.com.
