Airway Heights City Council members heard a request for supporting mass transit at their Jan. 25 study session from a different source — one of their West Plains neighbors.
Cheney Mayor Tom Trulove addressed the council about a second attempt by the Spokane Transit Authority at running a ballot measure to increase its sale tax and use authority to fund transportation improvements in the county. The difference this time is the amount STA plans to ask for is lower, 2/10ths of 1 percent versus last April’s 3/10ths, and two high-priced projects included in the special election measure have now received funding from other sources.
Spokane’s Central City Line, which would run from Browne’s Addition through downtown to Spokane Community College, is in line for federal money along with $15 million in state transportation funding, and a possible desire by Spokane City Council to “go it alone” in procuring additional funding. The other project, the West Plains Transit Center at the Medical Lake/Geiger Interstate 90 interchange, has received $8.7 million in a WSDOT Regional Mobility Grant funding and $951,500 in federal money for design work.
Trulove, who recently finished a term as Spokane Transit board of directors chair, said the transit center is crucial for development in the area in that it will create better, more direct connections between Cheney and Airway Heights.
“If I want to go to your city, or you want to come to mine, we have to go to Spokane (first),” Trulove told the council. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Noting the money is “in the bank” for the Central City Line and the transit center, Trulove said the sales tax initiative is primarily about maintaining STA’s ability to fund its infrastructure and equipment. He speculated there will be resistance from other parts of the county who won’t necessarily benefit from the increase, mainly Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake, as well as political pressure to keep the measure off the ballot in an election year.
“If we delay it for 2-3 years, all that federal, and likely state money, will go away and that will set us back a decade,” he said, adding work on the transit center is in a better position to begin soon than similar efforts on the Central City Line.
Airway Heights Mayor Kevin Richey, noting he previously worked for STA and understood their “crazy budget” problems, asked Trulove if the organization had cleaned up their issues. Trulove said part of the board’s work was to thoroughly go through how STA functions, discovering some procedures were “archaic” and updating a number of areas such as fleet replacement practices and how it balances costs and revenue projections.
In other business, the council approved moving several items forward for consideration at its next meeting, Feb. 1. Among those were two proposed construction project consultant agreements.
Public Works Director Kevin Anderson explained the agreements would allow design work to begin on an asphalt overlay of McFarlane Road between Craig to Hayford roads, and reconstructing and widening of a portion of a transportation loop from State Route 2 along Garfield and Russell streets, terminating at the Russell/Sixth Avenue intersection.
The city received Transportation Improvement Board grant funding in November 2015 for both projects — $1.782 million for phase one of the transportation loop and $691,200 for the overlay.
John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].
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