9:56 AM: Right after this morning’s West Seattle Transportation Coalition media briefing – full coverage on that is coming up – we spoke with City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen about his proposal to add money to the design budget for the “Fauntleroy Way Green Boulevard” project. As we first reported a week and a half ago, he proposed shifting $1.8 million to the project to finish design next year – it’s a plan that’s been more than a decade in the making.
More than $1 million was to come from sidewalk work that SDOT couldn’t start until 2015 anyway, and half a million was to be diverted from design work for a Northgate pedestrian project related to light-rail service that is still almost a decade away. Advocacy groups including Feet First pointed out that while the service is far away, the project involving an overpass needs to be designed ASAP or else some other parts of the project might be in jeopardy. So this morning, in response to our followup question, Councilmember Rasmussen said he plans to propose leaving the $500,000 in the Northgate budget, and downshifting the Fauntleroy request to $1.3 million, and that he is hopeful his fellow councilmembers will support that. Above is the latest version of the Fauntleroy proposal (click it to see the full-size PDF with details including 2 traffic lanes each way and a “cycle track”); SDOT told us earlier this month that they’ll be seeking community comments early next year – the last community meeting about the “Green Boulevard” was in 2012.
3:10 PM UPDATE: The sheaf of budget-amending “green sheets” attached to this afternoon’s Council agenda does indeed include a revised version for this project, with the $1.3 million we reported earlier.
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