PORT ANGELES — Clallam County has secured a $490,000 federal grant to build a roundabout at the collision-prone intersection of Sequim-Dungeness Way and Woodcock Road, commissioners have learned.
County officials plan to build a 135- to 150-foot-diameter roundabout with a 15-foot-wide travel lane at the intersection north of Sequim next year.
“This has been a subject of high interest to folks in District 1,” Sequim-area District 1 Commissioner Mark Ozias said in a Monday work session.
“My understanding is that this is generally the second-most highly trafficked, and the second-highest incident rate, of any intersection in the county.”
Clallam County was selected by the state Department of Transportation to receive up to $490,000 in federal Highway Safety Improvement Program funding to build the roundabout, county Transporation Program Manager Steve Gray said.
“The fact that we went out — and good job, Steve, by the way — and won a competitive safety-related grant also speaks to the benefit of doing this,” Ozias said.
“So I was really pleased to see this award come through.”
Commissioners next week are expected to sign a local agency agreement and project prospectus with WSDOT for preliminary engineering.
Clallam County will engineer the project in-house, Gray said.
“Work this year would include the engineering, environmental review and the right-of-way, with construction targeted for 2021,” James told commissioners Ozias and Randy Johnson, both of whom participated in the meeting by video.
The intersection of Sequim-Dungeness Way and Woodcock Road is presently configured with stop signs for travelers on Woodcock Road. Sequim-Dungeness Way traffic moves freely north and south through the busy intersection.
Only Old Olympic Highway, the busiest road in Clallam County’s 500-mile road system, had more collisions than Sequim-Dungeness Way from 2013-17, Gray said.
“The Sequim-Dungeness Way and Woodcock intersection had been the site of 10 serious injury accidents during this time period,” Gray said after the work session.
The city of Sequim has a roundabout at the intersection of Sequim Avenue, which becomes Sequim-Dungeness Way, and Old Olympic Highway. The city also has roundabouts on West Washington Street.
The planned roundabout at Sequim-Dungeness Way and Woodcock Road would be the first in unincorporated Clallam County.
Last year, commissioners decided to build a roundabout at Sequim-Dungeness Way and Woodcock Road rather than install stoplights, which would have cost an estimated $4 million.
“Our current estimated cost of the proposed roundabout is between $500,000 to $600,000,” Gray said in a Monday email.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
