MISSOULA — A downtown transportation project now years in the making earned enough votes on Wednesday to send it to final engineering and design.
The City Council's Committee on Public Works and Mobility voted 6-2 to advance the Downtown Safety, Access and Mobility project, with three council members abstaining. The vote frees up $3.8 million to allow DJ&A to bring the project from 30% design to 100% design with deliverables.
Megan McMeekin, senior project manager with Public Works and Mobility, said the agreement also comes with communications support, working groups, environmental permitting and the submission of final paperwork to the Federal Highway Administration.
“Our costs for the preliminary engineering phase came in under by $247,000. It was a credit back to us,” she said. “We can apply that to our final engineering budget. We were able to get this scope of work dialed in and within our final engineering budget for the project.”
The so-called Downtown SAM project started off with lofty goals that included a large remake of the downtown transportation grid. That included converting Front and Main Streets back to two-way travel. It also included narrowing Higgins Avenue south of the Clark Fork River from four lanes to two with a dedicated center turn lane and bike lanes.
But the costs of the project — funded largely by a $25 million RAISE grant awarded to the city by the federal government — have begun to climb. That has prompted the project's working group to scale back or change some initial proposals.
Among them, the project won't change the entrance off Front Street into Caras Park. Doing so would require more funding to complete a costly change in street grade. With other improvements to Caras Park planned down the road, that project element has been set aside.
“It would be more impactful than what was originally intended,” said McMeekin. “There are plans to improve that (park) area in other ways. We didn't want to make these improvements knowing it could change in a couple of years. We wanted to dial that back and do some incremental work right now.”
Also, due to costs, project planners were forced to scale back plans to install raised, separated bike lanes on Higgins Avenue south of the river. Instead, McMeekin said, the final design will include separated “at grade” bike lanes “to reduce the construction impact and cost."
City staff plans to present the final project back in more detail in early January, but on Wednesday, council members expressed lingering concerns. Among them, they haven't seen plans for the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Broadway, and the project doesn't include upgrades to the downtown stormwater system.
“It's a really old, dilapidated stormwater infrastructure. We're going to see problems with these degraded and aging systems. I think they should be improved while we go through with this whole thing,” said council member Kristen Jordan, who opposed funding the project further, along with Bob Campbell.
Members of the public also raised concerns around the lack of separated east-west bike lanes north of the river, and potential impacts on downtown businesses and parking.
“Admitting we were wrong is difficult. It's embarrassing to not meet the goals of a project that received federal funding,” said Danielle Petrie, a downtown business owner who has been critical of the project. “But the longer we wait to admit defeat, the deeper this project is going to dig into the pocket of our citizens.”
