No state funding this year for city projects

Giving an update to Blaine city council on February 24, city manager Michael Jones said that in the preliminary budgets of both the Washington State Senate and the Washington State House of Representatives, the city of Blaine did not receive any funding for its requests this year.

“It’s not really a very big surprise, and we had advised you that that would be very likely given that this is the off year for budgeting,” Jones told councilmembers. “Very small amounts were held in reserve to allocate. Initiative 976 of course made it extremely difficult to allocate any additional transportation funding for anything, so we were mostly looking at capital funding, which is non-transportation capital projects.”

The city’s top priority for transportation funding is the Bell Road grade separation project that would create an overpass above the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) mainline, alleviating the traffic delays caused by trains. For non-transportation projects, the city is prioritizing a Marine Park shoreline reconstruction project, which has already begun in phases and aims to remove debris and install natural beach in the area.

“There is a slight possibility, just a slight possibility, that during the reconciliation process, we might get something added in,” said Jones. “It’s a Senate proposal and a House proposal and they don’t necessarily match. In fact, they don’t match. Some things are in both proposals, some things aren’t, some things have different amounts even if they are on both proposals, so that all has to come out in the wash, and there’s a possibility that we might get something through that reconciliation. But I would be very surprised and pleasantly surprised if we did.”

Jones told councilmembers that he remains optimistic that funding for city projects will materialize in future state budgets. “Don’t look at it as a lost cause, because the whole reason we were there and the whole reason we continue to have our consultants working on that is really staging for future budgets and getting our project for the grade separation, as an example, on the whole state funding project for the future,” he said. “So we weren’t really anticipating getting $24 million for the bridge this year. What we want to do is make sure that it ultimately is funded when that bigger package goes through. So I think that our consultants continue to do a good job in that direction.”

The city has retained consultants at Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs (GTHGA) to lobby for state funding for local projects. In May of last year, the city approved another contract with GTHGA that funds ongoing services from June 2019 through December 2020.