After Petaluma highway funding, focus shifts to Rainier
For decades, no single issue in Petaluma has been more controversial than the Rainier crosstown connector. The roadway, which is planned to one day connect east and west Petaluma, has divided city councils, fired up political campaigns and appeared on at least two ballot measures.
Depending on one’s stance, Rainier is either a panacea for Petaluma’s traffic woes and a way for often isolated east side residents to access the city’s downtown core, or it is an expensive boondoggle that will open up 100 acres of land to unwanted development.
Politicians on both sides have in the past laid out positions on the issue comfortable in the knowledge that the project, so far, has been hypothetical, confined to an engineer’s blue prints and heated discussions in the city council chambers.
That is, until now.
A decision by a state transportation agency last week thrust Rainier into reality. Rainier Avenue currently dead-ends at Highway 101 just north of the Deer Creek shopping center, and the extension project has always been contingent on Caltrans constructing an underpass at the spot in conjunction with its freeway widening work. The freeway project had been stalled due to a lack of funding.
Then, last Wednesday, the California Transportation Commission approved $85 million to complete the two-decade long Highway 101 widening project through Sonoma County, funding the final four-mile gap through the heart of Petaluma. The move opens up new hope for advocates of building Rainier, and officials have taken a flurry of steps to advance the project recently.
But, the Rainier project faces a significant funding gap, and some feel other city transportation projects would be more effective at relieving traffic and should be built first.
“Now, with the possibility of freeway funding, Rainier has taken on a reality it hasn’t had to this point,” City Manager John Brown said.
Contentious past
The history of the Rainier project is as long as the proposed roadway is short. The .65-mile four-lane extension, which will pass under Highway 101 and over the SMART train tracks and Petaluma River to connect with Petaluma Boulevard North, was first identified in 1965.
Caltrans and the city planned for a freeway interchange at Rainier Avenue in the 1980s, and the city certified an environmental report for the project in 1994. Then, in 1999, a city council opposed to development in the area removed Rainier from the city’s General Plan, a controversial move that was subsequently overturned in 2004. Also in 2004, 72 percent of voters backed an advisory ballot measure supporting the construction of Rainier.
In 2006, Caltrans informed Petaluma officials that the Highway 101 interchange portion of the project did not meet minimum spacing requirements because it was less than a mile from the interchange at East Washington Street and would need a special exemption.
The city council in January 2010 voted to separate Rainier into two projects - the crosstown connector and the interchange - in order to work on the roadway extension first. In August 2015, the council voted 5-2 to approve the crosstown connector’s environmental report, with Mayor David Glass and Councilwoman Teresa Barrett dissenting.
The report says the Rainier crosstown connector is needed to offset traffic that is expected after planned developments are built. There are currently five roads in Petaluma that cross Highway 101 - Old Redwood Highway, Corona Road, East Washington Street, Caulfield Lane and Lakeville Street.
Developer funded
A 2014 city staff report lists the estimated cost of just the crosstown connector at $61 million. The city has anticipated that developers would pay the cost of the project and the city council included a traffic impact fee in the General Plan in 2008. That fee has been altered by various councils over the years, and is currently around $15,000 per single family home, $20,000 per 1,000 square feet of office space and $30,000 per 1,000 square feet of commercial space.
The city’s 2018-19 budget lists the total traffic impact fee fund at about $24 million, meaning a significant funding shortfall exists to complete the Rainier project, which is likely to get more expensive with time. But, as hundreds of new housing units are built in the next few years, the city’s traffic impact fund should increase, City Councilman Mike Healy said.
“We don’t have the funding in hand,” he said. “But over the next two to three years, as more developments come on line, we’ll collect more money.”
In addition to traffic impact fees, about half of the funding for Rainier is anticipated to come from the owners of the properties that the future roadway will traverse, Brown said. That land, the vacant parcels that abut Highway 101 just south of the Petaluma outlet mall, are currently undevelopable because they lack street access. Connecting the future Rainier extension to the properties, which are zoned for housing in the General Plan, makes the land more valuable, Brown said.
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