From Sultan to Seattle, road woes take toll
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"That's where my administrative assistant and her husband were killed," Walser says, pulling off the road as traffic whizzes past. "Man, I miss her a lot."
Highway 2, in about a 50-mile stretch through rural Sultan in Snohomish County, had more than 800 accidents in 1999 and 2000 alone, killing seven people and injuring 600 — which explains its nickname, "Highway of Death."
Seattle's notorious traffic jams may grab the headlines, but the Legislature's repeated failure to come up with more money for making roads safer, building new ones and repairing old ones is having far-reaching consequences in towns such as Sultan.
The Legislature is back in Olympia tomorrow, and political leaders are still fighting over how to pay for billions of dollars in road projects. The task is made even harder by a statewide recession and a hole of up to $1.2 billion in the general fund.
Gov. Gary Locke, who has proposed a 9-cent gas-tax increase over three years, says he's confident the Legislature will vote on a transportation package. But he's not predicting anything will pass.
Legislators are fighting over the same issues that bogged down past negotiations: How much should the gas tax be increased? Should it go to the public for a vote? Should workers on rural road projects be paid less than union-scale wages?
Anti-tax activist Tim Eyman has joined the fight as well, threatening to file a referendum that would force a public vote on any tax increase passed by the Legislature.
While the debate continues, our problems get worse.
Projects on hold
More than 400 projects are on hold statewide, ranging from a multibillion-dollar effort to widen Interstate 405 to a $30,000 project in Eatonville that would improve safety at an intersection on Highway 7. "The backlog is growing at an alarming rate," says Doug MacDonald, the state's transportation secretary.
About two-thirds of the projects are in areas outside the Puget Sound urban region. As Walser says, "People out here are being overlooked."
Budget cuts have reached all the way down to maintenance of highway signs. "We had a sign fall off in Skagit County on I-5," MacDonald says. "Thank heavens it didn't fall off on somebody."
Not everyone believes more money is needed. "Properly used, there are plenty of tax dollars there to take care of transportation," says Eyman, whose anti-tax initiatives wiped out several hundred million dollars in revenue that once went toward transportation.
Most state leaders believe otherwise, saying Washington needs to invest in its transportation system or face falling behind other states.
"We had better realize that the world can divide into winners and losers," MacDonald says.
Frequent fatalities
Sultan, like many other towns along Highway 2, is losing.
It's a rural, one-stoplight city with 4,000 people, about 40 miles northeast of Seattle. Walser, a bear of a man with silver hair, has a framed picture of Barney Fife hanging behind his desk. His officers chase stray dogs as part of their duties.
They also respond to traffic accidents.
Roughly 22,000 cars and trucks stream through Sultan each day on Highway 2, a 91 percent increase in a little more than a decade. In 1999 and 2000, there were about 100 accidents within town limits. "It's a two-lane road; you have to watch what you're doing," Walser says.
As the chief of police in a small city, all too often he knows the victims. On Sept. 16, 1997, his administrative assistant, Donna Moore, and her husband, Robert, were killed when a truck hit them head-on. The truck was trying to avoid a car that had stopped to make a left turn. The truck driver slammed on the brakes and crossed into Moore's lane.
Six months later, the wife of a wrestling coach in town was killed just a few hundred feet down the road. Crosses mark where they died.
One of the main sources of collisions: people trying to make left turns where there are no turn lanes. There's so much traffic that school buses can't make it onto the highway unless police officers stop vehicles in both lanes.
Walser gets annoyed when legislators in Olympia focus on traffic around Seattle, as if that were the state's only problem.
He's not alone in his concerns.
"Just about every week we'll have a head-on out here. Fatalities are quite common," says Ken Foster, the mayor of Gold Bar, a few miles east of Sultan. "I-405 and I-5 seem to get all the attention. They forget about us guys out here."
Towns along the highway have banded together to lobby the Legislature and the state Department of Transportation (DOT). Their efforts have paid off in the form of some safety improvements where Donna Moore died, and in several other areas.
Yet many safety projects are on hold. DOT has a list of 38 safety projects under study statewide, but there's no money to build them. More than half of the projects on hold would cost less than $1 million to complete.
Major fixes, such as bypasses around cities on Highway 2 or widening parts of the road to four lanes, seem far away.
"There's no water in the well," Walser says.
Trying to catch up
There's no mystery why.
Washington's population has increased 43 percent since 1980. Vehicle registrations are up 57 percent. Traffic is up almost 90 percent. Yet the Department of Transportation's capital budget, adjusted for inflation, has increased only about 7 percent in two decades.
There have been several attempts to catch up.
The Legislature passed a 5-cent gas-tax increase in 1990. The money was quickly spent on new projects, such as helping build an Interstate 90 bridge. But the state's population boom continued.
Another major push to increase spending was tried in 1998, when voters passed Referendum 49. The measure would have poured an additional $2.4 billion into transportation projects throughout Washington.
But voters turned around the next year and took away the money by approving Tim Eyman's Initiative 695, which slashed the state motor-vehicle excise tax to $30.
The state Supreme Court found the initiative unconstitutional, but the Legislature ultimately voted to keep car tabs at $30 for the most part.
The move wiped out money for new projects and left a $1 billion hole in the Department of Transportation's biennial budget.
The Legislature has been deadlocked over what to do ever since.
DOT is focusing on preserving the existing transportation system, but corners are being cut. The state has had to lower its standards for road maintenance and repair.
"We try to cut back on the stuff that isn't under people's tires," MacDonald says. But small cuts can lead to bigger problems.
For example, DOT has cut back on its inspections of culverts, or pipes that carry water underneath roads, for blockages. As a result, a culvert along the Deschutes Parkway in Olympia became clogged and led to a mudslide that closed the highway during Thanksgiving, MacDonald said.
Locke's proposed transportation package would raise taxes to provide $8.5 billion over 10 years for transportation projects statewide and give taxpayers in the Puget Sound area the ability to raise another $5.1 billion locally.
Still, it's just a down payment on transportation needs expected to cost more than $100 billion during the next two decades.
MacDonald notes that Locke's proposed 9-cent gas tax may seem like a lot, "but if we don't do it this year, it will be 10 cents next year and 11 cents the year after," he says. "In the meantime, the business community will say we're unable to get out of analysis paralysis, and that they are unwilling to sit around and watch us struggle with these issues."
Once a simple process
It wasn't always this way.
There was a time when the Legislature had it easier when it came to passing transportation budgets.
"We always simply had the votes, and more votes than we needed, usually. It was not a big deal," says Rep. Ruth Fisher, D-Tacoma, chairwoman of the House Transportation Committee.
Legislators say they were able to agree on transportation packages in the 1980s because it wasn't a high-profile issue, the cultural divide between rural and urban areas wasn't as pronounced, and the anti-tax movement had not yet taken off.
Now the reverse is true.
Traffic jams have a regular spot on talk shows, rural and urban areas constantly bicker over spending, and there's a strong anti-tax movement in the state.
All of that is reflected in the Legislature, with some lawmakers opposing spending money on public transit, others on spending for roads but not transit, and still others opposing various increases in the gas tax.
Add a dozen or more other issues and it becomes easier to understand why the Legislature has such a hard time agreeing on what to do.
Democrats have control of both houses of the Legislature and the governor's office for the first time since 1994, but it's not clear if that will make a difference in dealing with the transportation crisis. Fisher says it will still take a bipartisan effort to get anything passed.
Yet most legislators agree something must be done, or the state will pay a big price. "I think we're at one of those turning points," says Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee.
Walser couldn't agree more.
Towns such as Sultan need help now, he says.
"The only thing I can tell you is 10 years is too long. Five years is too long. Something has to happen, and it's going to cost money."
Andrew Garber can be reached at 360-943-9882 or agarber@seattletimes.com.