Key part of Pierce County’s Canyon Road improvement project nearing an end

The junk-removal phase for part of Pierce County’s most lengthy and expensive construction project to date is almost complete along Canyon Road East and Pioneer Way East.

Canyon Road East and Pioneer Way East are a part of the greater Canyon Road Regional Connection Project, which will help connect Frederickson to the Port of Tacoma and ease traffic congestion. The project will include rehabilitation work to protect numerous acres of wetlands and wildlife.

Cleanup is taking place on 19 acres that Pierce County acquired from the previous property owner for $300,000, said Letticia Neal, engineering manager for Pierce County Planning and Public Works. Last year, the former owner removed a “significant amount” of refuse, including old vehicles, construction materials and equipment, Neal said. Over the past month, county-hired contractors took out rusty trailers, abandoned cars, concrete slabs and scrap metal, according to a Pierce County news release.

So far, the county has paid about $105,000 in cleanup costs.

“I think we’re really at the end of the cleanup phase of what we can do,” Neal said. “We have stabilized the properties, we’ve eliminated a lot of the materials that could have continued contaminating the sites and contributing to long-term environmental problems.”

Once cleanup is wrapped up, the lands will be maintained until construction of the wetland mitigation systems and roadway can begin. Construction is slated to begin in 2025 and end in 2028, assuming the county secures the over $100 million necessary for the project.

The Canyon Road Regional Connection Project expands the road from the intersection at Pioneer Way East in Puyallup to 70th Avenue in Fife. It will include the construction of three new bridges, including one over the wetlands at that intersection.

The wetland rehabilitation work will include installing woody habitat structures in streams, replacing invasive plants with native vegetation and replacing impassable fish barrier culverts, according to the news release.

The wetlands include a degraded stream near the Chief Leschi Schools campus. Brian Johnston, environmental biologist at Pierce County Planning and Public Works, said restoring a salmon-bearing stream on Puyallup tribal land is of great importance.

“We’re going to have an opportunity here to offset the impacts on the road project, but to do something that can really boost what we value a lot in this area, and that’s fish,” Johnston said. “By being able to take this stream out of a ditch, put it into a meandering natural stream, is a huge benefit that’s coming out of this project, and to be able to do that on tribal reservation land makes it extra great.”

The overall investment in environmental mitigation is more than $1.5 million and will span across 26 acres.