Vancouver misses grant to improve connection between I-5 and SR 500

Vancouver lost out on a $147 million federal economic stimulus grant to improve the connection between state Highway 500 and Interstate 5.

The proposal included two new ramps originally developed as the northernmost pieces of the broader Columbia River Crossing project. State transportation planners eliminated the ramps at Highway 500 as part of a package of cost-saving cutbacks to the multibillion-dollar crossing project; instead, they tried to convince the Obama administration to build the ramps sooner as a separate economic stimulus project.

Now that the feds have rejected it, engineers are going back to Plan B.

“Capital construction costs for CRC don’t include this interchange,” said Mandy Putney, a spokeswoman for the bistate crossing office in Vancouver.

As currently planned, the scaled-down project may be most noticeable for the loss of access.

Engineers are planning to eliminate the ability of westbound motorists to come off SR 500 and merge right on I-5 to exit at Fourth Plain. Plans are to strip away that connection to reduce hazardous weaving and save money in the overall crossing project, which is still estimated to cost $2.6 billion to $3.6 billion. (Motorists will still be able to exit I-5 southbound to Fourth Plain).

City officials are worried about the loss of access from SR 500 to Fourth Plain.

“We find that the impacts to Vancouver, our residents and businesses would be severe and adverse, and cannot support such a loss of freeway access to our community,” outgoing Mayor Royce Pollard wrote on behalf of the city council in December.

Those concerns remain, said Matt Ransom, the city’s transportation planning manager.

“We’re still working with the project to resolve that issue,” Ransom said.

Neighbors’ concerns

Not everyone is wild about keeping the connection, however.

In the Shumway neighborhood, a variety of CRC-related freeway improvements means that keeping the 500-to-Fourth Plain connection would require sliding the existing ramp to the west — eating into dozens of properties on the west side of I-5.

Lisa Ghormley, vice chairwoman of the Shumway Neighborhood Association, said local homeowners will lose out. Plus, she said, freight traffic headed to the Port of Vancouver will increasingly cut through Fourth Plain due to the fact that a new light rail line is likely to impede traffic on Mill Plain Boulevard.

“I would like to have seen a more planned-out transportation system for the west side of this area,” Ghormley said.

Ransom counters that, even though a direct extension of Mill Plain a decade ago was intended to become the primary freight route to the port, Fourth Plain would also be needed to handle business access and trucks through the city’s west side.

“You needed to have both corridors to serve the demand,” he said.

As it stands, CRC project planners still intend to block westbound motorists on SR 500 from exiting on Fourth Plain.

One of three proposals approved

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced last month that the Washington Department of Transportation received only one of the three projects it sought through the latest round of “shovel-ready” projects.

Engineers designed new ramps that would have carried motorists from 500 westbound to I-5 northbound and from I-5 southbound to 500 eastbound. Currently, motorists make those connections through a labyrinthine series of stops and turns on local roads.

Now, the new ramps will be dropped from the broader Columbia River Crossing project.

The Obama administration provided $35 million to build a 3.7-mile portion of a new 10.5-mile-long freeway in north Spokane.

The administration turned down the state DOT’s request for $147 million for the Highway 500 project, along with a separate request for $300 million to build portions of the new state Highway 520 bridge replacement across Lake Washington in the Seattle area.