Panel will review Columbia River crossing project

[Chief]

http://columbian.com/news/localNews/2008/03/03022008_Panel-will-review-Columbia-River-crossing-project.cfm

Sunday, March 02, 2008

A Tuesday panel discussion will examine the Columbia River Crossing project, a $4 billion-plus project that likely will involve replacing the Interstate 5 Bridge and bringing light-rail transit to Vancouver.

Panelists include:

* Matt Ransom, city of Vancouver transportation planning manager.
* Doug Ficco, Columbia River Crossing project director.
* Jeff Hamm, C-Tran executive director.
* Dave Frei, Columbia River Crossing Task Force and Columbia River Crossing Community & Environmental Justice Group.
* Mark Masciarotte, Columbia River Crossing Urban Design Advisory Group.
* Seanette Corkill, Columbia River Crossing Pedestrian & Bicycle Advisory Committee.
* Roger Qualman, executive vice president of Norris, Beggs & Simpson and Identity Clark County board of directors.

The “First Tuesday” presentation, sponsored by the Vancouver Planning Commission, is 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesday in the council chambers at Vancouver City Hall, 210 E. 13th St.

The event is free to the public. Anyone interested in attending is asked to contact Terry Lenhart at 360-487-7955 or terry.lenhart@ci.vancouver.wa.us.


There's an un-biased bunch for ya...::)

If this is open to the public, I wonder if they will be answering questions too??

WB, we might want to be at this one...

[Waterbuffalo]

Chief, I can confirm watching the past First Tuesday events held by Jon Caton and Pat Jollota that they are WELL and Hugely popular. It probably will be taped by cvtv and Patella proponents will no doubt be there. So please get out your pencil and Q&A sheet ready with some questions.

Surprised they'd announce this in such a short order and notice. Most 1st Tuesday things that come before the City of Vancouver Planning Commission are widely announced way before hand. Not sure I'll be attending or not if its this Tuesday. Have several appointments that will be running right near that time frame.

Though don't count me out for showing up and trying to bite my tongue......

[Waterbuffalo]

I'm not going to be ablt to attend tonight. I just came home from the doctors office and very tired. Will try and watch it on CVTV in the next few days when its put up on the website.

[Chief]

I'm sans transport this evening so I won't be there either. I doubt they will be saying anything momentous anyway...

[Waterbuffalo]

In a day or two, i think it will be recorded for CVTV viewing pleasures..

[tefen]

http://www.cityofvancouver.us/cvtv/cvtvindex.asp?catID=999&titleID=1318

[Chief]

Well! CVTV is getting much faster about posting these things...

Good job Tefen!

[Waterbuffalo]

Program Schedule

• Fri, 3/7 at 11:30 pm on CVTV-21
• Sat, 3/8 at 7:30 am on CVTV-23
• Sat, 3/8 at 3:00 pm on CVTV-21
• Sun, 3/9 at 1:15 pm on CVTV-23
• Sun, 3/9 at 10:00 pm on CVTV-21
• Wed, 3/12 at 4:30 am on CVTV-23
• Wed, 3/12 at 3:00 pm on CVTV-21

[Waterbuffalo]

Going to try and listen to this.. But won't be doing any notes...

[tefen]

1:30:00 in, they're showing a "Heritage Bridge" over I-5 at 7th street (no cap?). The suggestion is a suspension pedestrian bridge. I say make it a green iron lift span in rememberance of the old bridge.

Maybe it can lift a couple times a day for large trucks to pass under.


Oops, just after that he's showing the cap.

[Waterbuffalo]

I'm watching it now.. I'm about near Doug Ficco Speaking. Honestly Chief, I think he is reading from your script.

Matt Ransom at the beginning does show some of the historic pictures of the old Highway 99 (now I-5) bridge as it was in 1917.

Lots of information, so Chief and any one else, please download to your computer or WATCH via Windows Media or your favorite wmv player.

Its about 2 and a quarter hours. Looks like tefen and I are in a race to finish? :-)

[Waterbuffalo]

At 40 min. Doug Ficco was saying the CRC might be looking at a couplet running up Main Street to Kiggin's Bowl or Lincoln NA.

This was a HUGE problem with a lot of the businesses along that area in Uptown and the Dairy Queen area.

IF any of the representatives for the City of Vancouver are reading this, you might want to watch this time point near 40:00 where Doug is speaking of it.

[Chief]

This is all OBE without any rational discussion from the City about how to raise the money to pay for it. I don't want to hear the word "grant" from them either.

All we hear is how the economy is sliding down, money is tight, taxes are already too high, but the City of Vancouver goes on with their planning for all of this. They don't have the money for any of this stuff, and aren't likely to any time soon.

8)

[tefen]

They mention in the video that the biggest portion of the money would come from tolls.

I also love at the end when they're asked about how much congestion it will relieve... there's some stammering, and then they say that lots of people will ride the public transit across, so congestion will go down.

[Waterbuffalo]

I have not had a chance to finish watching it. Just got done watching Doug Ficco speak and working on Digesting Dave Frei and the rest.

One of my hugest concerns is WONDERING why the transit system is all being shunted into Downtown Vancouver. If I worked or ran a business in East Vancouver or East Portland, Why would I want to go all the way to Downtown to cross the river and then have to come all the way back into East Portland/Gresham.

Also a major portion of this talk was about how the transit was going to be a major factor in the City of Vancouver over the next 20+ years as the continued to grow. Doug was doing a lot of speaking to this. That transit would be the central mode of getting around the City of Vancouver.

Being a rider of C-tran probably more than most of the fateful or faithful riders, right now the system is a mess. A lot of the buses are 10 to 20 minutes on some routes and other areas there is no bus service where they should be a heck of a lot more (Why is there no sunday service to WSUV?) I'd love to see a bus run up I-205 from Gateway TC all the way up Salmon Creek TC or Stockford Village. Would this not be a preferred alternative to get across the Heavy congested I-5?

Honestly Chief, if you watched the first half as I did, there was no doubt what the plans were for the community as far as transportation matters were concerned.

Back to watching it later this afternoon when I get back..

[tefen]

Did you really just ask that, WB?

You're aware CRC is working within the Bridge Influence area, a 5 mile section of I-5. You already know the RTC is working on plans for HCT through the rest of the region.

This is mentioned in the video as well.

[Waterbuffalo]

Tefen,

If you have attended the past three months of the C-tran Board meetings including the last one which CRC and HCT was making update presentations. You would have noted the comments from the C-tran board that were concerned about the costs of many of the different projects that the HCT was proposing for Vancouver.

If you looked at the map I saw at the last HCT meeting that had northeast I-205 blocked out of the study area as not one being serviced by transit in the 30 years as a transit corridor it hugely concerns me.

If the City of Vancouver and C-tran board along with HCT is considering shifting and shunting all of its transit from all points Clark County into the Downtown area without looking at other corridors like running some transit down I-205 to Gateway Transit Center this concerns me. Why does it concern me?

Where is most of the next wave of developable land? I's say in the North and East end of the Urban Growth Boundary? I-5 honestly is just a congested and will be a congested corridor even into the future.

Now how relate to the Columbia River Crossing? If you have seen the past justifications for building the bridge, it was using the commuter market of Battle Ground and other North Clark County citizens that every day seem to like to shunt down the same little corridor along I-5. With I-205 in the future going to have the same problems as I-5, do you think Inter-clark county transit being shunted across the river at this crossing is ever going help?

Back to tefen, if you had seen what Chief and I have been watching for the past three years, including the past six months from the High Capacity Transit study the RTC is studying, you'll know that the CRC and RTC are working together and sharing data on both of the aspects of their projects.

The CRC's area is just one small section of the RTC study area.

[tefen]

I agree completely. I do believe that HCT needs to happen on 205, and I would like to see it sooner than later. But if the bridge project is happening now, it's a good idea to incorporate the HCT into it now to avoid the huge cost of adding it later.

If they were re-doing the Glenn Jackson bridge I would expect them to be including HCT in that project as well, but they're not. Yet.

I would expect that in the next few years (and hopefully before 30 have passed) that the little HCT spur in downtown Vancouver will expand further and go east. We already know that they've suggested need for a "streetcar" on the 4th Plain Corridor, and that the RTC is studying LRT along that route....

So it's not going to happen today, I'd say it's definitely on the table. One thing at a time. Since this project is in the works now, this is a good place to start.

[Chief]

They mention in the video that the biggest portion of the money would come from tolls.


Tolls will go towards paying for the bridge, PERIOD. If you toll the bridge you are paying for the bridge structure, not the light rail or any other transit portion.

By Federal Law, you can't pay for Transit by tolling the roads, especially those designated as part of the Federal Interstate Highway System. To imply that the tolls will be used to pay for anything else is misleading and simply not true.

The other point of this is that the Light Rail portion of the CRCP has nothing to do with reducing congestion. Light rail is used Nationwide as a development tool, and that's all! Get it through your heads that none of this light rail business is going to do one goddam thing to reduce traffic congestion, and those who keep saying it will cannot back their words up with facts to prove it.

Don't take my word for it. Go try and pry loose ridership numbers out of C-Tran for those special shuttles they have running to the Expo center to hook up with Max. I hear those buses have the good smoked glass on them so people don't see that they run essentally empty.

All of this talk of Transit studies is moot without some concrete, sustainable, and realistic financing tool that is currently completely missing. There isn't a hope in hell that half of this is going to get financed, and I don't care how incremental you are about it tefen.

The fact is that the City has a growing list of outstanding projects in the Neighborhoods around the rest of the City, can't pay for 10% of those needs right now, but insists on pursuing hundreds of Millions of development dollars for just Downtown. That's not reasonable, they cannot do it without going to the Voters first, and I haven't seen one of these transit plans that amounts to a hill of beans yet.

The full-blown system that the CRCP was prepared to propose initially would have cost so much to build, that there was no hope of getting the Maintenance and Operation funds to run it.

The MOS that they have come up with that just gets the system over the bridge and to a frickin' parking lot at Clark College will still cost $3.5 Million to operate in just the first year.

Let's not forget that the City is still digging for $40 Million for just the tunnels into the Boise Cascade site, and once they uncork that, Christ only knows how much more money they will look to sink into it. All so they can create 20,000-30,000 new car trips a day in and out of Downtown.

What's the air in Lincoln going to be like then tefen??

[tefen]

Sorry Chief, I thought you were talking about the bridge itself when you were asking about funding.

I imagine the operation costs for LRT will be funded through a CTran tax increase that will include "all the areas served by LRT" which in their eyes is Vancouver, Hazel Dell, Salmon Creek, Ridgefield and Battle Ground, even though it doesn't reach to any of those places. They had numbers in the video, I believe they said 53% of the expected ridership would come from Vancouver, the rest from the county north on I-5.

You're right though, it's easy to make up expected riders.

[Waterbuffalo]

Tefen,

I'll add from watching the C-tran board. The subdistrict that they are pursuing for Light Rail and Bus Rapid transit will be mostly *Based* in the UGA and City of Vancouver..

There will be no taxing for these modes of transportation to Battle Ground, Woodland, La Center, Ridgefield or any of the other smaller hamlets of Clark County. I do expect that Camas might be one of the few small cities that might be included because most of the jobs in Clark County ride along their borders and a lot of the new CMP growth is near Western Camas/East Vancouver and Orchards areas.

So they will be be putting together a small subdistrict WITHIN the City of Vancouver and around it to fund this nice piece of machinery that will get to go past Lincoln NA..

I am going to agree with Chief's first paragraph, it was stated in Columbia River Crossing meetings more than 14 months ago I believe that the Bridge and Improvement monies could NOT be used for two things, 1) Make improvements on transit.. and 2) No tolls could be placed on I-205 to counter the shift of people crossing the I-5 bridge on to the other free way to avoid the toll.

So Light Rail or BRT will not be able to move toll funds or any other bridge or road bed funds into any other project except for what they are specifically written to do. There is a separate slush fund at the FHWA according to many reports that Chief vehemently opposes and disagrees with.

I'll add my two cents that the state has no money to do any thing. They don't even have enough money to keep the Washington State Ferries afloat even at thie minute.

[Chief]

See my comments elsewhere this morning. It all ties together anyway with a common theme of "Where does all this money come from??"

Sorry if I flew hot on this last night fellas...it gets a bit frustrating after a while, when you realize how many realities are being completely ignored by these people who study this stuff for decades. How many families are we feeding on the Columbia Crossing alone??!!

8)

[Waterbuffalo]

Sorry if I flew hot on this last night fellas...it gets a bit frustrating after a while, when you realize how many realities are being completely ignored by these people who study this stuff for decades. How many families are we feeding on the Columbia Crossing alone??!!

Its ok, Chief.. Can understand your frustration when we are according to our mayor, the fourth largest tax paying city in Oregon with no representation or choice.

Honestly Chief, I have said this on other threads you posted and I'll say it here.. Nothing is going to change on this subject and screaming about it isn't going to help. Do you honestly think the Oregon state officials care??

Back to the Columbia River crossing and tefen, There is going to be a lot of subjectives and commentary that need to be answered before the Clark County and rest of SW Washington are going to go for this bridge.

One of my current questions I want to pose to Tim Leavitt and any other candidate, is why are we shuttling Transit and Light Rail from the East Side of Vancouver and Clark County to Downtown Vancouver BEFORE going into Portland. Would it not be cheaper and faster to move all of that transit traffic along the free ways and into Portland on to Light Rail system? Why are we transiting folks through our community when really they're wanting to go south?

When Orchards and East side of Vancouver is the next annexation block on Vancouver's table, why would ANY one want to go across town on a slow bus or light rail then into Oregon, when they're all ready bus options to two light rail stations at the Airport and having them transition into the light rail system there? Righting the LRT from Vancouver from Parkrose Red line is 10x faster than crossing Vancouver on a bus/LRT/BRT, then crossing a river crossing that is slow as it is now?

[Chief]

Roll over and ignore it if you like, but I intend to raise hell about these things as long as possible.