Key test for Rainier Avenue extension

One of Petaluma’s biggest infrastructure priorities in a generation, the Rainier crosstown connector, will face an important hurdle on Monday as a key underlying report goes before the Petaluma City Council for approval.

If accepted, the report will help pave the way for Caltrans to include a crucial underpass as part of its planned project to widen and elevate Highway 101 through the heart of the city. The four-lane, .65-mile Rainier connector would link North McDowell Boulevard and Petaluma Boulevard North, passing under the highway and bridging the Petaluma River and Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit tracks.

Though the required environmental impact report is itself fairly routine, it nonetheless represents an essential milestone and the latest vision for a project that has been discussed in various forms for half a century. While efforts are still underway to identify more than $100 million in funding for the highway project that would enable the connector to go forward, an absolute best-case scenario could bring the long-discussed roadway to Petaluma as early as 2020, according to previous reports to the council and the Petaluma Planning Commission.

“You have to do all that stuff so that it’s shovel ready,” said Councilwoman Kathy Miller, the city’s representative to the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, which is among the agencies funding various highway projects in the county. “When they do the freeway widening, we’ll be ready to go.”

The vote is likely to be the city’s last public decision before Caltrans officially embarks on engineering that would incorporate the Rainier underpass as part of the related highway project, which plans to widen 3.5 miles of Highway 101 between the north end of Petaluma and Lakeville Highway. The city already has agreed to fund the additional costs related to the underpass, with around $7.5 million currently set aside for design and construction, said Petaluma Capital Improvements Division Manager Larry Zimmer.

A long-discussed proposal to include a new highway interchange at the location is currently on the back burner, after the council voted to break that element off as a separate project in 2010.

The most recent projections presented to the City Council in September of 2014 estimated the entire Rainier connector, minus the interchange, would cost the city $60 million, paid for by income generated from regular city impact fees over several years. Yet that cost could escalate significantly if the highway project were to go forward without the underpass, said Dan St. John, the city’s director of public works.

“The underpass will sit there and wait for us until the stars align and this road is ready to be built,” he said. “If for some reason we miss this opportunity, it would just be so ungodly expensive to put it in later.”

Both Miller and St. John cited reasons that the environmental impact report appeared poised to sail through the council next week. More than 72 percent of Petaluma voters approved an advisory measure in 2004 in support of the Rainier connector, and the project is currently included in the general plan that the city uses to guide its infrastructure priorities through 2025.

Still, the high-profile project failed to inspire harmony for the city’s planning commission in June, when a split 3-to-3 advisory vote sent no clear recommendation to the council before the upcoming decision. It was the latest example of the often acrimonious debate over the project that has played out from the dais over several decades, including a 1999 vote by a previous council that totally removed the project from the city’s general plan.

The Rainier connector was added back to the city’s long-term plan under a changed council five years later, and Miller said political and public momentum seemed strong for moving the project forward.

“The people I talk to who are in that stage of their life when they’re shuttling their kids around town, they want this. Badly,” she said. “It’s not just people on the east side trying to get downtown. If you live on the west side of town and your kid plays lacrosse or soccer, you’re coming to Lucchesi. You’re coming to Petaluma Community Sports Fields.”

Meanwhile, the path forward for funding the related highway project through Petaluma, required before the full Rainier connector can go forward, is less clear.

Sonoma County Transportation Authority officials were optimistic after freeing up around $16 million in new road funding through a bond refinancing earlier this year, with hope it could help attract additional state funding to widen a different, $35 million stretch to allow nearly 5 miles of continuous carpool lanes south of Petaluma. Yet with California’s gasoline tax income at its lowest level in years, Supervisor David Rabbitt, who heads a highway funding search committee for the transportation agency, said there was simply less state money available to allocate to such projects.

“We’re still optimistic we’ll be able to find the dollars. We’re turning over every rock,” Rabbitt said.

Looming even larger is the bigger-ticket widening project through the middle of Petaluma, which the agency estimates could cost as much as $120 million after related property acquisitions, he noted.

Among the available tools is the county’s Measure M quarter-cent sales tax, a 20-year measure approved by voters in 2004. The tax generates between $17 million and $20 million per year, with 40 percent pegged for Highway 101.

Increased sales tax revenue in an improving economy allowed the transportation agency to refinance bonds based on the tax to free up money for new spending, and further economic growth may give additional opportunities to generate new funds from Measure M, Rabbitt said. Yet even if such funds become available, it may be necessary to embark on a future sales tax measure, perhaps linked to specific projects and road preservation, that could fund the remaining pieces of the Highway 101 widening project in southern Sonoma County, he said.

“I do think, in the next few years, we’ll have to look at re-upping Measure M,” he said. “Everybody benefits from a quality road system.”