On Tuesday, Sept. 8, the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted Council Bill 116611, approving three agreements with the State of Washington that will allow the state to proceed with the reconstruction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct from South Holgate Street to South King Street.

The plan to replace this section of the viaduct with what is primarily a surface route has been agreed to by all stakeholders. Completing this project will replace approximately half of the elevated structure, greatly reducing the risk for loss of life and property in the event of a serious earthquake.

Under this legislation the city and the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) agree that WSDOT will perform the design and construction of, and procurement of materials for, the SR 99 Viaduct removal from South Holgate to South King Street Stage 2 Project.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) will coordinate the city's design review, permitting, environmental remediation, construction support, and inspection activities, and regulate WSDOT's use of rights-of-way for the project.

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) will provide design review and construction inspection to determine that all SPU standards and requirements are met prior to placing the new water, drainage and wastewater facilities into service, will connect the portions of the water supply system relocated by WSDOT to the existing water system, will perform some of the work to connect the new drainage and wastewater facilities, and will provide all fire hydrants.

Seattle City Light (SCL) will pro vide design review and construction inspection to determine that all SCL standards and requirements are met prior to placing new or modified electrical distribution lines and other electrical facilities into service, and will provide all 26kV transformers for the project.

These detailed contractual agreements are the key legal steps necessary to implement the conceptual agreement that the city and state came to in 2007 to proceed with the set of then-agreed to projects (known as the 'Moving Forward' projects), which could be constructed prior to making a decision on the Central Waterfront section of the project, the area that has raised the most controversy.

This ordinance completes the work of the council on this part of the viaduct project. Relocation of utilities has already begun under earlier ordinances, and demolition and construction will begin next year.

The next step in moving forward the replacement of the viaduct with a safer alternative will be approval of a concept agreement with the state for the steps to be taken to construct the bored tunnel alternative. That legislation has been approved by the council's transportation committee and will come to full council in the near future.

Sometime in the next few months, the council will then take up legislation that formalizes that agreement with a set of contracts similar to these.

In the meantime, in addition to this work on the south end projects, a number of other projects are already underway or in preparation, most notably the city-led project to renovate the Spokane Street Viaduct and add additional on and off ramps to enable smoother flow on Spokane and better access between it and downtown.

Editor's note: This article appears originally in Richard Conlin's newsletter "Making it Work."