High-Speed Railway Continues To Worry Lakewood Folks

The Point Defiance Bypass high-speed railway proposal continued to draw the ire of residents and concerns of Lakewood city officials during a project update at Monday’s City Council meeting.

Ron Pate, program manager, and Larry Mattson, environmental engineer for the Washington State Department of Transportation, outlined the proposal’s progress as it has wound through conception, development and environmental review.

If ultimately approved, the Bypass proposal would reroute passenger trains from the BNSF Railway main line that runs near Point Defiance and along southern Puget Sound to an existing rail line that runs along west of Interstate 5 through South Tacoma, Lakewood, Fort Lewis and DuPont.

WSDOT officials say the existing rail line through Lakewood is located along an 18-mile lightly used freight corridor owned by Sound Transit and part of the bypass route is the same route that Sound Transit will use to extend Sounder commuter rail to the city.

Pate recapped various alternatives that have been studied and discarded in favor of the Bypass route.

“We’ve had regular meeting with the advisory teams, with neighborhood associations and community groups, and we continue to have meeting as we move through this process,” he said. “We’re still in the environmental assessment phase. There’s a lot of ongoing public outreach in this process.”

Mattson said the process has been guided by the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The high-speed railway is the result of nearly 20 years of planning and investment in the Pacific Northwest high-speed rail corridor as far south as Eugene, Ore.,” he said. “The purpose of the Bypass—one of 15 projects along the entire route—is to reduce trip times, achieve greater schedule reliability and offer additional trips to meet growing demand.”

The goal, Mattson said, is to provide more frequent and reliable speed passenger rail service, to utilize existing corridors over new routes to reduce impacts and costs, and to enhance efficiency by decreasing trip times and improve safety at crossings.

During the process, WSDOT developed several alternatives in concert with an advisory committee and citizen input. These have included the so-called Shoreline Alternative (while follows the existing Cascades Route), the “Greenfield” alternative (including six variations), the Point Defiance Bypass Project and, ultimately, a “no-build” option.

The focus has been on economic and technical barriers, Mattson said, and on finding alternatives that can best avoid those obstacles.

Lakewood resident Alan Hart criticized the Bypass proposal, saying it will destroy lives of local residents.

“We already have I-5, certainly a mixed blessing and curse,” he said.  “The addition of a high-speed railway is no mixture.

“We will be taxed even more to subsidize more riders as well as paying to install it. They will destroy our neighborhood, permanently disrupt our lives so a few people from Seattle can save six minutes getting to Portland.”

Hart called on the City Council to oppose the Bypass project and use the city’s influence to lobby state and federal government to reject it.

Councilman Jason Whalen said Lakewood appears to be receiving most of the burden and none of the benefit.

“Maybe if there is a (passenger-train) stop in the community, it would slow the movement,” he said.  “As of today, I’ve heard there is no plan to stop in Lakewood. That should be an option looked at.”

Councilman Michael Brandstetter said Lakewood is an “inviting route,” since the city does not have any real leverage in the ultimate decision.

Mattson noted that approvals come from the federal level down, with Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Native American Indian lands receiving the lion’s share of political consideration.

Options already taken off the table include the existing Shoreline route around Pt. Defiance due to engineering constraints, including costs of right-of-way acquisition, tunnels and necessary infrastructure, which would run about $30 million,” Mattson said.

Deputy Mayor Don Anderson questioned whether planners had looked seriously at reconfiguring the existing tunnel along the Shoreline route to accommodate a high-speed line.

City Manager Andrew Nieditiz said there has been discussion about the prohibitive expense of building a second tunnel somewhere near the existing one, which is unsuitable due to its age and condition.

The next steps, Mattson said, include an open-house session Aug. 31 at Clover Park Technical College, a review in October of major project reports on noise, vibration and social elements in November and, ultimately, release of the environmental assessment report in fall 2012.

“January or February of next year the reports should be done and we should have mitigation measures,” Mattson said. “We’ll have some of them on the wall and invite neighborhoods to come out and look at them and propose new ideas that may not be on the wall.”

Community safety remains a concern, he added, especially in Tillicum where a “pedestrian trail” may be an appropriate mitigation.