Shawn Vestal: Support the North Monroe project – have breakfast or get a haircut

The cinnamon French toast special at Dale’s Waffles Plus comes with two eggs, sausage or bacon, and an excellent view of seemingly every piece of heavy equipment in Spokane.

Outside, North Monroe Street and the sidewalks lining it have been torn up. Stacked pipes of varying shapes and purposes sit on the dirt and gravel roadbed. Workers replace water valves at the intersections, look over plans on truck beds, toil in hip-deep holes. A grader scrapes past on the packed dirt and gravel roadbed – all while, inside, a waitress greets a regular: “You back in town until the snow flies again?”

For the massive North Monroe Corridor revitalization project, the time for argument is over and the season of reality has arrived. If you like what’s being done on the street – improved curbs and sidewalks, narrowed lanes and slower traffic – then now would be a decent time to consider that French toast special. Or a gyro at Azars, or tacos at Gerardo’s. Or a haircut at Dan’s. Or a bit of tailoring at Duc’s …

Because the Monroe project is very promising, but the businesses will pay a price.

The $7.1 million project is unusual in a lot of ways, not the least of which is its size. It will retool the streets, sidewalks, lighting, landscaping, water pipes, parking and other infrastructure along 16 blocks of Monroe – a stretch that includes about 80 businesses trying to make it through the six-month construction window.

All of the normal effects of road construction are amplified, and the city has responded with an unusually large public outreach effort, said Marlene Feist, city spokeswoman. A single project official holds “office hours” weekly for business owners or residents to attend, ask questions and address any problems; weekly progress meetings are also open to the public.

The city helped facilitate counseling and coaching for businesses from Washington State University and is spending about $200,000 in matching grants to businesses along the route to improve their facades. Twenty-seven businesses sought the funding, and are said to be planning an estimated $800,000 in storefront improvements.

There’s also a PR campaign with a website, Meet on Monroe, that includes an interactive map and other resources to let people know what’s open and how to get there. (It’s at monroeproject.com.)

“This is a unique project,” Feist said. “We want to see how we can help keep businesses open during a construction project like this.”

Crews broke ground April 2, and work is expected to be completed in October, Feist said. To get the work done in a single season, the city split it between two contractors. Each of those is now doing half of their portion of Monroe: between Kiernan and Euclid, and between Grace and Montgomery avenues.

On those stretches, the roads, curbs and sidewalks are long gone – a thoroughfare of dirt and gravel stretches from the front doors of the businesses on the east side of the street to the front doors of those on the west. At Dale’s, for example, you want to be careful stepping out the front door to avoid dropping off a short ledge.

“It’s slowed us down some,” said Dale Westhaver, who is the Dale in the Waffle House, “but not as much as I thought it was going to.”

Dale’s was not packed Tuesday morning, but there were several tables full of customers. Up and down the sections of street that had been torn up, most businesses were open but quiet. The impact of these next few months on those enterprises could be drastic – one of the main reasons the project has been so divisive.

The arguments haven’t so much been resolved as become moot. The long-planned project grew from the need to improve safety on the street, and relies on $4.6 million in state and federal funding. The City Council approved it in 2014, but criticism intensified as construction neared, with opponents saying that narrowing the road from five lanes to three would back up traffic, and the long construction season would doom some businesses. But the council went ahead with contract approvals earlier this year, and dirt has started flying.

Signs of the dispute remain – literally. A “Say No on the Monroe Street Project” banner hangs on the outside of Azar’s, even as heavy equipment bustles and scrapes all around it.

To walk the torn-up stretches of Monroe right now is to see the area fresh – to begin to see it as it could be without the gray manacle of deteriorating roads and sidewalks. It’s almost eerily devoid of car noise, so you hear the work being done: a shovel sliding into gravel, a beeping front-loader in reverse, a plastic garbage bag torn from the roll, the sifting thump of dirt sliding into a truck bed.

Caught between the two stretches of construction is Elliotts, An Urban Kitchen, a new restaurant that opened Tuesday at 2209 N. Monroe. Raelene Elliott, who owns the restaurant with her husband, Tony, said she’d had a few customers already in her first hour of business Tuesday.

“The construction is a little bit scary,” she said. “But we have a lot of faith in the project.”

A lot of us have a lot of faith in the project. A lot of us have a lot of faith in the goals of making neighborhoods more walkable, pleasant and accessible – places to stop, rather than drive through.

But a lot of us who have that faith don’t have much at stake in terms of that construction project. Those who do – the people selling haircuts and antiques and appliances and cocktails and gyros and French toast – could use our help right now.