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RobertaMike Phillips: Can you please state your name and spell your last name? Perry: My name is Perry Shea, S-H-E-A, and I’m a principal engineer with Parametrix. I manage the office in Lacey, Washington. Our address is 8870 Tallon Lane, Lacey, WA 98516. Mike Phillips: And for the record, I’m Mick Phillips of Owens Davies, Counsel for the City. Perry, can you give us your educational background? Perry: I received a Bachelor of Science Engineering at St. Martin’s College in 1984. I’m a professional engineer in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. And I’ve been practicing traffic engineering and planning for over 20 years. Most of my experience and work has been in the south puget sound/Thurston County area. I do work for all the jurisdictions in the County doing long range planning, subarea planning, corridor planning, comprehensive planning and also arterial, street, intersection and highway design. So I have a pretty good knowledge base of the issues and traffic characteristics in Thurston County, particularly Yelm. Mick : And you’ve been a consultant for the City of Yelm for a while? Perry: I have been working with the City of Yelm since 1989, primarily as their traffic consultant and expert as it relates to long term planning and growth, and building their infrastructure. Mick: Can you provide the Examiner with some of the history and background on the Yelm traffic issues? Perry: Yes. Before we get into the specifics of the traffic study, I think it’s important to give an overview, kind of a regional context with Yelm. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the City Council, and residents that have been living here since that time, there’s traffic issues, traffic problems in Yelm. There’s only one main corridor going through the City. And a lot of that traffic is through traffic/background traffic. At the time, in the early 1990’s, when the Council determined that there was a significant issue, we were asked to evaluate that, and to go through about a year, year and a half long process to develop their long range transportation plan, to meet the Growth Management Act in particular. And this study was actually one of the first transportation plans to be adopted to meet the GMA requirements in the State of Washington. Since then, it’s gone through several updates. Some of the findings of that work was that, because of the limited amount of facilities going through the City, we needed to look at alternate routes. And that’s where the Y3, the Y2 and other corridors like that were developed. The Y designation represents basically Y stands for Yelm and the number is the project number that was developed in a list of projects in the plan. So when you hear the term Y3, Y2, Y6, it just represents a project that’s identified as a needed facility over time. The outer loop, the loop highway system, has been a primary project that the City, and other stake holders, such as DOT, Federal Highways, Intercity Transit, Thurston Regional Planning Council, Thurston County, a whole host of folks, have been working hard and diligently to get that project to fruition, get constructed. Since its inception in 1991, a lot of things have happened, an environmental document, an EA was approved, a FONSI, which is a Finding of No Significant Impact was issued in 2001 by the Federal Highway Administration, which basically sited the approved route of the Y3 Y2 corridor, which is now called the 510 loop and the 507 loop. That allowed the City and DOT to begin partnering to leverage future funding dollars to build the corridor. And that has happened. When the gas tax went into effect, $33 million allocated to this corridor for finishing design at the access hearing and right of way acquisition. Right now, the project is currently in design, going through design documentation, developing preliminary design drawings and additional environmental work for the corridor as it leads up to the access process and right of way acquisition procedures. Because of the uncertainty in the gas tax, the project is not on hold, it’s just on basically a slow burner right now in what we’re doing. I’m actually the project manager for DOT on that corridor. Depending on what happens, the project will still move forward through design. I can’t speculate exactly what will happen with the dollars for right of way and construction. But we have been anticipating and programming that this corridor could be in place in the next 5, 6, 7 years. And that’s been pretty accurate. We’ve actually, in 1991, we looked out over 20 years and said can we, you know, this will take a 20-year plan. Well, you know what? We’re pretty much on target for that. The 510 Loop is the project that is currently in that cycle. The other loop highways are further out because they don’t provide the emergent benefit that the 510 Loop does by allowing traffic to circulate around town that really doesn’t have a destination to the City. It’s a lot of the through traffic that goes to Pierce County, to and from Lacey as commute trips primarily. It also allows for some of the freight mobility traffic to route around town. And it provides access and circulation improvements to that quadrant of the City which it currently does not have. Currently, if you’re in that part of town, you have to access Yelm Avenue to get anywhere. And that’s the limitation of the grid system that the City currently has in place. An important part of the Transportation Plan that was developed was making street connections, providing alternate routes to Yelm Avenue. That was a fundamental policy and it’s been a significant goal of the Council, as well as staff, to implement that, those goals. They do that when developments are developed. A recent arterial extension was completed and is open that has provided significant benefits. Stevens Avenue was extended to West Road which now provides another route to get over to the commercial area in town, versus using Yelm Avenue. There is testimony about the extension of 103rd to the north. Again, that is in complete alignment with the Comprehensive Plan to make street connections to provide alternate routes for traffic to disperse along the system. So, over the last, since 1991, significant strides have been made. The City Council was actually very progressive back then and has been very diligent in using their dollars and leveraging their efforts to get additional funding monies to build these street improvement projects. The 510 corridor and the 507 loops, those are significant regional projects that take a lot of time to develop. So, as that was unfolding in 1995, the City in the Comprehensive Plan, looked at the Level of Service policy of the City and developed Level of Service D for their commercial areas, with the exception of the core area which is Level of Service F, until, basically, Level of Service F, until other features, these planned loop facilities are in place, to alleviate the traffic burden that is currently on the existing Yelm Avenue. That was the policy, that’s been the direction, that’s currently what is in place now when reviewing concurrency. On a corridor level, we look at Level of Service D for proper planning and design of facilities. For concurrency, in the downtown corridor, we look at Level of Service F because we do not want to widen downtown to six lanes. That was an underlying goal and a significant reason why the loop highways are being planned – to keep the Yelm Avenue corridor to a three lane urban arterial that will basically travel through the City. The loop highways are meant to divert that traffic, take that additional traffic burden away so that we don’t have the Spanaways, we don’t have the Pacific Avenues, we don’t have the Martin Ways going down through the middle of town, which would really tear up the entire city. That was a fundamental reason why that policy was made and the loop highways are now being implemented. So I just wanted to give some clarity on that, some background. I think it’s important so you folks that are here that live in town. The City’s been working diligently on this for a long time, and have made significant strides and have made several transportation improvement projects to help circulate traffic around town. And I understand. I drive down here all the time and I probably know, I have a significant amount of history and knowledge of the traffic situation here. And why I’ve been working hard with the City to make sure these systems are in place as time goes on. Mike Phillips: Perry, what’s the relationship between the loop roads that you’re talking about and the Wal-Mart proposal or any other proposal? Perry Shea: In the Comprehensive Planning process, and even the work that we’re doing on the loop highway, to design that facility, we are looking at travel forecasts out to 20, 25 years. In fact, for the purposes of this corridor, we did what was called a 2030 forecast. So what will the traffic, what can we expect in 2030 when the loop system is implemented? And that’s based on the regional traffic model. It’s based on the current land use plans that are adopted within the jurisdictions. It also includes traffic background or traffic influx from Pierce County. A lot of things go into this process to understand the relationships of, when we build these facilities, how will traffic be routed, what attractions will be made, and how much traffic will have to be on the corridor when it opens. The corridor always assumed in the analysis that we did since 1991 and all the subsequent updates a commercial development of some sort would be in this particular area because it’s zoned that way. So when you look at the traffic volume, you look at various employment and population forecasts, there is an underlying assumption of commercial development activity that goes into the model. When you get a site specific application like the Wal-Mart proposal, then we take a really close look to see is that in alignment with, if not what do we need to do to make sure that that traffic is mitigated? And that’s the exercise, part of the exercise of what we did. And it’s one of the reasons why we requested the applicant to evaluate the 2010 horizon year, assuming that if the corridor was open in 2010, is the program that they’re doing, the store, the traffic that they’re generating, is that going to conflict or be different than what we’re planning for, for the loop highway system. Mike Phillips: If the loop highway system isn’t built for 10 more years or 15 more years, how does that change your analysis of this particular project? Perry Shea: It doesn’t change the analysis for Wal-Mart, the application, because they’re looking at their impact at the time of opening their store which is pretty much the requirement, the level of standard that we request them to do. And so they’re required to mitigate their impact for the time of opening in 2006. We take a broader look as the City or the DOT to look at, ok, over time, is our system adequate to handle these facilities. We actually did a detailed traffic component as part of the update for the 510 loop project, which analyzed all of the core intersections downtown as well as the loop highway system for 2010 and 2030. And with the corridor in place, we have acceptable service levels in the downtown area except Yelm Avenue. The only one that’s really problematic currently right now is Yelm Avenue and First Street. When the 510 loop highway’s built, that intersection performs fairly well because we’re diverting such an amount of traffic around town. So we looked at the cause and effect. If you were to build that corridor, what would that mean to the existing intersections that we currently travel through right now. And it does meet that test. It meets the service levels that we would apply to those intersections.