WSDOT again warns it may close local access to U.S. 195 without Latah Valley improvements

Long-simmering tension between the city of Spokane and the state Department of Transportation over the strained road network of the Latah Valley may be boiling over amid sharp disagreement about how to manage an upcoming 1,000-home development.

The development in question is the Victory Heights project by Redmond-based Blue Fern Management just south of Thorpe Road and west of U.S. Highway 195. That company has been in the news recently for its controversial acquisition of a property surrounded on two sides by the Victory Heights development, where it intends to eventually build another 1,000 homes in the Latah Park development.

The comparably sized Victory Heights development is significantly closer to breaking ground. There is currently a moratorium on development in the Latah/Hangman and Grandview/Thorpe neighborhoods, the second in three years, which were requested by WSDOT and put in place while the city came up with plans for fixing the area’s longstanding problems. However, the Victory Heights project already was in the development pipeline when the moratorium was put in place, and not affected.

While both parties agree that many key roads and intersections would fail without expansive infrastructure improvements, they disagree on the appropriate path forward. Both sides accuse the other of misrepresenting the situation and not doing enough to prepare the Latah Valley for its explosive growth.

The state agency has appealed the city’s agreement with Blue Fern and the issue will be argued before the city hearing examiner in April. The hearing examiner will also hold a hearing Wednesday on mostly technical aspects of the plat. Regardless of the examiner’s conclusion, WSDOT will have the final say on what to do with the highways it manages.

Officials from WSDOT argue the city has reneged on agreements to share costs with the developer to sufficiently and safely manage traffic in the area when the Victory Heights homes begin to be built and occupied, which the agency warns could cause systemwide failure in Latah Valley. If the city moves forward without addressing these issues to the agency’s satisfaction, WSDOT has said it may make good on its threat to close off local access to U.S. 195 from Thorpe Road to prevent unsafe conditions elsewhere, especially where U.S. 195 merges onto Interstate 90.

“They’ve completely changed course,” said Ryan Overton, a spokesman for WSDOT. “We had agreements with them for mitigation. We thought we were on track.”

City officials, meanwhile, argue their agreement with Blue Fern will be sufficient to prevent key roads, including Thorpe and the highways, from receiving failing grades. Where fixes to major, expensive problems have not been immediately identified in their plan, officials say it is unfair to put decades of neglect on the backs of a single development.

“We think (WSDOT is) laying at the feet of this one development the whole regional transportation issues that have been developing for decades,” said Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown. “We want safety, we want infrastructure, we want the corridor to work, and we have ideas about how to get there.”

The city is working on plans to spread the costs of eventual solutions more evenly across the area’s development and note Victory Heights will be built in phases through 2035, giving them some breathing room for more difficult fixes.

But WSDOT believes problems have gone on long enough.

The region’s issues by no means start with Victory Heights. WSDOT has been warning it may close off local access to U.S. 195 since at least 2020. The agency pointed to unmanaged growth since the 1990s, when WSDOT allowed the city to extend sewer infrastructure in the department’s right of way, successfully spurring growth in the Latah Valley. The agency also has warned since at least 1995 that local infrastructure needed to be addressed to manage growth, pointing to the Thorpe Road tunnels under the BNSF railroad and Fish Lake Trail as a likely failure point.

Thirty years later, that warning could come true if something isn’t done.

“The current tunnel conditions show the existing system cannot accommodate the forecasted growth from background pipeline developments, regardless of additional traffic from the Victory Heights development,” wrote Kirkland-based consultant Transpo Group in a report prepared for Blue Fern.

In a Dec. 12 draft memo by Inga Note, a city senior traffic planning engineer, wrote that the tunnels would fail to meet legal standards if they weren’t widened. Because the city did not have the funding available to widen the tunnels, “the development…cannot proceed forward in its current form,” Note wrote.

City Planning Director Spencer Gardner noted that this draft memo was not representative of the city’s final position, as new strategies and conclusions were considered in the interim. The city is, in fact, requiring the issues at the tunnels be resolved during development, as well as issues at the intersection of Thorpe and U.S. 195.

“The form of that requirement looks a little different than what WSDOT wanted, and this is also true of the Thorpe intersection at U.S. 195,” Gardner said. “We modified things, because with all of the challenges with infrastructure there, and with the developer committing to a significant amount of infrastructure investment, we decided to collaborate with the developer as the development takes shape.”

The city has built-in points during development where the effectiveness of those strategies will be re-evaluated and development can be paused prior to any road in the system failing, Gardner added. Further studies and conversations with stakeholders will determine what exactly should be done.

Overton stressed that the City Council already approved a Spokane Regional Transportation Council study on U.S. 195 and Interstate 90 in 2022.

“We can’t continue to plan, there is nothing more to study,” Overton said in an email. “It is purely time for action.”

Another major point of disagreement: whether Inland Empire Way needs to be reconnected to U.S. 195 during construction of the Victory Heights project, which would relieve some of the pressure off that highway and I-90 from traffic headed to downtown Spokane. WSDOT believes it is a necessary solution and should be a condition for Victory Heights’ approval; city officials argue this infrastructure improvement will be studied but cannot be put on the back of this development.

“It didn’t seem fair to the project,” Gardner said. “This Inland Empire Way connection is 1.5 miles away from the project, and the further you get, the harder it is to tie a specific improvement to the impact of a project.”

Both sides also sent The Spokesman-Review several examples of the work their own agency had done to improve conditions in the corridor and argued that the other party needed to take more responsibility.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to accurately reflect the purpose of Wednesday’s hearing examiner meeting. The hearing examiner will oversee an appeal of the development agreement, including WSDOT’s concerns, in April.