The ongoing effort to improve Ocean Shores’ Point Brown Avenue with sidewalks, crosswalks and redesigned parking continues to inch forward.
A fourth design concept known as Alternative D was introduced at the city council meeting earlier this week and cost continues to be the central concern.
Public Works Director Nick Bird and Debra Seeman of David Evans and Associates in Olympia, the firm hired to do the design work on the project, presented the option. “As we looked at the history, we ruled out options A, B and C, and there’s a huge cost associated with that,” Bird said.
The overall cost would be less than the other options, but alternative D would cost more money to acquire some right-of-way parcels prior to construction.
Seeman said the idea of the new alternative was to create a meandering sidewalk/bike path and preserve the existing transportation corridor, keeping the 25-foot-wide grass median intact between the four lanes of traffic.
“We left the existing travel lanes intact, and that’s a large savings from the existing alternatives,” Seeman said. Angle parking stalls were added throughout “wherever we could” in the new design, Seeman said. Most can accommodate oversize vehicles.
The stone city gates would be left intact, and the design would add one roundabout at Ocean Shores Boulevard, with a proposed roundabout at Shoal and Point Brown removed from the other initial alternatives, adding left turn lanes instead. The design includes new street lighting, but it also has impacts on about 35 different right-of-way parcels that would be needed to complete the plan.
There are now an estimated 210 parking stalls in the Point Brown corridor, and the new alternative would result in 130 angled parking stalls, fewer than alternatives A and C.
Total program costs are $12.87 million for alternative D, which is significantly lower than the $15.1 million cost of alternative A, or the $14.3 million cost of alternative B, and the $15.48 million cost of alternative C. Alternative D does have the highest right-of-way cost of $2.04 million, but the lowest estimated construction cost of $8.2 million.
Thorn Ward of John L. Scott Real Estate noted the design closes many of the street turnouts and crossings on Point Brown.
“The closing of these turnouts will funnel more traffic into the roundabout,” Ward said, predicting it would cause more traffic and thus more accidents in the roundabout.
The turnouts, he added, have been in place for nearly 60 years “and carry hundreds of vehicles every day.”
The city hopes to tap federal funding sources, but those likely will require matching costs, and Mayor Crystal Dingler suggested the city also could look for other sources to help with the matching funds.
