(Tuesday photo of 53rd Avenue project site, by Chas Redmond)
By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
“This project has been a long haul,” King County Wastewater Treatment rep Martha Tuttle told Thursday night’s Alki Community Council meeting, referring to the 2-years-and-not-done-yet 53rd Avenue Pump Station Project.
Uneasy laughter flowed through the room.
“It has been two years that we’ve been in construction and the fatigue the community feels is strong. We do apologize for that,” she continued. But she had some good news.
The bike path is supposed to reopen today (we had a preview of that news from Chas Redmond earlier this week). As for the rest? Provided nice weather remains, the road reconstruction will start “within 10 days” and take a month or so. Which means the project COULD be all done by March.
Without explaining exactly what had taken so long – the county’s been telling us for many weeks that they and the contractor are “going down a long punchlist” – Tuttle did say the $11 million project is not costing more because it’s taking longer – she said they’re paying the contractor for the work, not the time. And the scope of the work, she reminded the 40-plus people in the Alki UCC gathering room, is big – the underground pump station is “now three times bigger than it was – 70 feet long, underground” including a generator to be sure that power outages don’t shut down the system and send untreated sewage flowing into Puget Sound.
(December photo courtesy King County)
And once it’s all done, she promised, they’ll offer tours for anyone interested (watch the Alki Community Council website at alkinews.com for word of scheduling).
But first, neighbors have a bit more to endure. The road construction work will include “noise, hammering, sidewalk removal … more noise to put up with, and we do apologize for that, but it is almost done and you won’t have another summer with this in the way of your park,” Tuttle said.
That concept seemed a little nervous-making for neighbors who wonder if they’ve suffered some damage because of the work that’s been done already – one neighbor mentioned having brought in an insurance rep, and having a soil engineer “check for erosion.” To that, Tuttle noted, “We did a series of (pre-construction) photographs in all the homes between 53rd and 54th – if you’ve noticed damage, cracks, sinking, they go through the claims process.”
She did more apologizing when one attendee declared he wouldn’t believe any future project promises of a safe walkway – since in this case, the walkway has been completely closed for more than half a year, and even before that, he said, it didn’t work very well.
Then again, complaint-fielding seems to have been quite the task during these past two years.
At left, you see Tuttle holding up a sheaf of paper she described as “the telephone log … literally thousands of calls.”
Alki Community Council president Jule Sugarman wants the group to find a formal way to give the county its opinion of how things have gone – and recommendations on how they might better deal with other neighborhoods burdened by long-running projects in the future.
(Also at tonight’s meeting, Parks Board chair and former ACC president Jackie Ramels talked about the Parks Code of Conduct – we’ve added that to our update on the new tobacco policy, here. Watch alkinews.com for updates between meetings; the Alki CC regularly meets on the third Thursday of the month, 7 pm, Alki UCC.)
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