What’s Going on with the Fair’s New Street?

(Photo Credit: Tacoma News Tribune)

The Fair is coming to town … on a brand new red carpet that you paid for … twice! Let’s talk about it.

My campaign team and I re-wrote this blog post a few days after originally publishing it the weekend the Fair opened this year. After receiving feedback from community members and seeing the response my opponent (the outgoing “mayor”) wrote on social media, I wanted to update my post to correct a couple errors I included, discuss in greater detail the funding sources for the current project, and highlight what people are most upset about regarding this project: City Council, under direction of my opponent, voted to rebuild this street for $5 million, after already spending $2 million of our tax dollars to rebuild the exact same section of street a couple years prior.

If you’re from Puyallup and you’re like me, you have a complicated relationship with the Fair. In many ways it puts Puyallup on the map, and brings visitors from across the PNW to experience what our city has to offer. I loved attending as a child, and taking my daughters there throughout the years. It’s great, but it’s not without its own problems. It makes our already bad traffic even worse for a month every year, and it seems we always have to bend over backward to meet the Fair’s financial demands.

When I walk around door to door and ask voters what they care about, they tell me they’re angry about this – and I’m with them. Let’s break down what the City and my opponent on Council is doing wrong on this front, and what I would do differently.

5 years ago, our District 1 incumbent voted to approve a budget that included rebuilding that section of 9th Ave SW adjacent to the Fair, and in 2021 the City tore the street up, rebuilding it to include new sidewalks where they were needed most. The project cost us as city taxpayers $2 million directly out of our general street fund.

Then a couple years later, again under direction of my opponent, City Council decided to throw that $2 million down the drain, tear up all the completed work, and convert the exact same section of street into a “festival boulevard” with promises of porous asphalt, decorative concrete at crossings, wider sidewalks, bollards/delineators, planters, new pedestrian-scale lighting, signal work at Meridian & 5th, and utility/storm upgrades. (City of Puyallup.)

The street will certainly be nice, but how much nicer than the way the City rebuilt it in 2021? What about all the other streets in the city that are bumpy, full of cracks, and neglected while the Fair gets dibs to rebuid its street twice? To show you what the street looked like in 2016, and what it looked like after the 2021 rebuild, here are street views from Google Maps for comparison:

Construction has been ongoing since February of this year, and despite the Fair opening this week, the construction is yet to be completed. The non-union company the City contracted with is failing to meet their mandate of finishing within 130 working days of receiving its Notice to Proceed on February 3rd, meaning it should have been done at the end of July. The City website now says the project will proceed throughout September while the fair is taking place.

In his response, my opponent says that this project has been on the City’s Transportation Improvement Program since 2016, but he didn’t have the foresight to avoid throwing away $2 million from our street funds after rebuilding 9th Ave SW once, then later budgeting another $5 million dollars to redesign and rebuild it again this year.

In this latest prioritization of the Fair over the rest of our streets and sidewalks, $1 million would come from the State Fair itself, with the rest coming from taxpayer dollars. My opponent says that’s fine because “only $600,000” was taken out of the city sewer and storm funds we pay every month in our utility bills, and the rest is from state grants we all pay into, and city funds like the Lodging Tax Fund (LTAC) paid by local hotels.

That fund is an important source of revenue for organizations in our community, and there is a real “opportunity cost” to small organizations when City Council directs a significant portion of LTAC funds to entities like the Fair which has huge revenues of its own.

Beautifying and modernizing our city is something I will never be opposed to – but it will not be for the benefit of one power player at the expense of Puyallup taxpayers. Puyallup needs a Council representative in District 1 who will go to the negotiating table with the Fair instead of selling out his constituents and their pocketbooks. That’s what I would have done, and I certainly will never vote to spend taxpayer dollars on the same thing twice.

With big projects like this, we need real transparency. Council representatives need to get input at neighborhood meetings, rather than always expecting taxpayers to show up at council chambers never knowing if what they say will matter. Bottom line is that voters need to know there’s proper oversight and representation for every constituent when big projects are proposed – and this is where Kastama continues to fail.