PORT ANGELES — The city’s first roundabouts will serve as planters for stormwater-filtering rain gardens that also will help control residential flooding.
The multipurpose effort received a $1 million state Department of Ecology grant that the City Council approved last week for the $1.44 million West Fourth Street Stormwater Improvement Project.
The city will put about $441,000 into the project, including $333,333 from stormwater utility reserves as a one-third match for the Stormwater Retrofit and Low Impact Development Grant and $108,000 in flood control funds.
Centered on the city’s flood-prone Crown Park neighborhood in the I Street area, the effort is intended to improve the quality of stormwater runoff that is discharged into Port Angeles Harbor.
The harbor has been listed as an impaired water body under the federal 1998 Clean Water Act for not meeting water-quality standards for dissolved oxygen.
The location of the estimated half-dozen traffic-circle rain gardens and the final design for the project will not be determined until after public meetings are held, with construction likely to begin next summer, city Public Works and Utilities Director Glenn Cutler said.
Councilman Brad Collins, who has championed low-impact development for the city, praised the effort.
“There is some expense to it, but the benefits clearly outweigh the costs,” he said at the council meeting Tuesday night.
“We do need to solve a problem there.”
Once completed, the roundabouts are intended to have a “traffic-calming” impact on a neighborhood filled — like many of the city’s downtown residential neighborhoods — with traffic intersections void of stop signs, Cutler said Friday.
He compared the roundabouts to similar traffic-control features in heavily residential Seattle neighborhoods.
Smaller than Sequim’s traffic circles, they should make drivers drive more slowly in an area where the streets “are pretty much uncontrolled,” Cutler said.
Drivers tend to drive faster on wider streets, he said, noting that traffic moves slower in downtown Port Angeles where bike lanes have been installed.
The city had considered putting curb extensions called “bulb-outs” in the neighborhood, but that proved unpopular at a neighborhood meeting, so Public Works changed course.
More public meetings on the project will be held.
“If we put circles there or bulb-outs and you cause the driver not to drive as fast, that’s considered traffic calming without putting in stop signs or yield signs,” Cutler said.
“Visually, it makes the road look smaller.”
Some roads in the roughly 12-block area also will be recontoured so water that now sheets in the streets and floods homes will instead flow to the rain gardens, said Public Works and Utilities Engineering Manager Kathryn Neal, who gave a presentation on the project to the City Council on Tuesday.
Unlike the soil in the neighborhood, it will not saturate quickly, allowing it to absorb water and providing water-quality treatment and detention, she said Friday.
The detention is what Betsy Bauman, 82, likes most about the project.
The West Sixth Street resident lives about 200 feet from where a traffic-circle rain garden would be located.
She, like many of her neighbors, owns a sump pump that rids her basement of water in the winter, she said.
“I’ve had some major flooding problems,” Bauman said.
“Water runs down the street and over the curb and into the yards,” she said.
“It’s like a large lake in my yard.”
She said she’s also happy with the idea of traffic circles.
“This new concept is infinitely better,” Bauman said Friday.
“In fact, I’m enthusiastic about it.”
Rain gardens also were installed by Peninsula College in the school’s parking lot in a $1.14 million renovation project in 2010.
But having the rain gardens integrated with traffic circles is unusual, said civil engineer Amie Broadsword of PACE Engineers Inc. of Kirkland, the company designing the project.
“It’s pretty unique,” Broadsword said, calling the traffic circles “mini-roundabouts.”
“They are pretty small and able to fit in this residential area,” she said.
“It’s a great project for Port Angeles. It’s great to have Port Angeles have a more natural drainage system.”
The city is not required to make the improvements, Neal said.
“We are going above and beyond for the sake of water quality,” she said.
“We think it’s the right thing to do, to do water-quality treatment, and the grant from the state lets us afford it.”
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
