Gig Harbor ‘businesses are hurting’ during downtown construction. Here’s what might help
The detour and road closure to build a roundabout at Harborview and Stinson was never going to be easy.
But now that work at the key intersection in downtown Gig Harbor is underway, city leaders are considering a way to make it easier.
The City Council will vote March 14 on whether to give the contractor a $75,000 incentive to speed things up.
“Staff, the Mayor and Council have been actively listening to the concerns regarding the length of closure for the Harborview/Stinson project,” a post on the city’s Facebook page said March 9. “Internally, we’ve been working hard, having in-depth continued conversations with all stakeholders and researching logistics and feasibility on alterations and possible solutions to limit the impacts on traffic and small business.”
The post went on to say: “We’ve submitted to Council what we believe is the best possible way to move forward with our existing contractor, which includes an incentive to finish the project in a shorter time frame, potentially ending the one-way closure by late May, instead of late July.”
Work on the project started last fall, paused for the winter and resumed Feb. 28. Crews closed Harborview Drive southbound from North Harborview Drive to Stinson Avenue, putting a detour in place for southbound traffic.
Public Works director Jeff Langhelm said Friday the incentive would pay the contractor an additional $5,000 a day, for up to 15 days, to finish work that would let them open up traffic in both directions. However, “traffic will still be alternating one-way during construction hours,” he said.
The contractor still would have work to do, he explained – utility work and landscaping, for example – that it would need space for.
“Basically, everything outside the travel lane,” Langhelm said.
He said city officials have continued to have meetings, in-person and virtually, with businesses and residents affected.
Starting last summer, Langhelm said: “We made the council and the public aware, through the website and social media postings and signs, that there was going to be some significant disruption at this intersection.”
‘Businesses are hurting’
Mary DesMarais, executive director of the Downtown Waterfront Alliance, said she’d shared the news about the incentive with businesses.
“I would encourage the businesses and the community to rally behind this project and encourage the City Council to approve the funding it would take to get it done more quickly,” she said.
DesMarais said the nonprofit is also considering promotional campaigns to try to get people into downtown businesses.
“Businesses are hurting,” she said. “People, unfortunately, are totally avoiding downtown. And I think there’s a misconception that there’s maybe bad traffic downtown, but there isn’t.”
There are ways around the construction, she said, that take a few extra minutes.
DesMarais said the “community really stepped up,” to support local businesses during the pandemic. She said she encourages residents to do the same through the construction.
“They’re coming off of two very difficult years with the pandemic and staffing shortages and snow storms and various other things,” she said. “Support your favorite business downtown. … Let’s make sure that they stay here.”
Gig Harbor Restaurant Week this month seemed to help get visitors downtown, she said.
“The good news is, the city is trying to shorten the project and get it done before the summer season starts,” DesMarais said. “That’s when a lot of businesses rely on the tourism to get through the rest of the year.”
She said the city had public hearings and asked for comments about the project.
“Public Works, especially, right now is trying to be listening to the concerns of the community and the businesses that are so heavily impacted down here,” she said. “… I think the entire downtown district is feeling the impact of it.”
‘An imperfect storm’
Mike Schmidtke, manager of The Beach Basket gift shop, said March 10 that business had dropped close to 50 percent.
The closure just started, he noted, and he hopes shoppers will get used to the construction traffic flow.
“It doesn’t look good, trend-wise,” he said. “It looks like it’s affecting things quite poorly.”
Asked about the incentive, he said: “That would be wonderful. You would hope they could do that, weather willing maybe. The whole harbor, it is a tourist destination, and summer will have a big impact if they’re still working on that.”
From May on, he said, is tourist season.
“Even though it says: ‘thru traffic, local business access,’ a lot of people are kind of scared, so I don’t think they utilize that,” he said. “… I want to see if we can’t get them to wrap this up before June, really.”
The fall closure for the project was “pretty painful in and of itself,” he said, and it’s not just the road closure that’s challenging businesses.
Gas prices, the war in Ukraine and inflation are making things difficult, Schmidtke said, on top of the challenges of occupancy limits imposed early in the pandemic and supply-chain troubles last year.
“If gas goes up to $6 a gallon, I just don’t see how it’s not going to affect retail,” he said, pointing out the average person would have less money to spend.
“It just seems like an imperfect storm that’s hit right now,” he said, during a time that “should have been probably a resurgence in business and everything.”
He noticed signs on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Tacoma that named individual businesses that were open during construction there. Something like that would be nice, he said.
“Stinson, Harborview, it’s a tough corner,” he said. “Hopefully in the end it will be better. I don’t know how much blood we’ll have to shed until it’s all done.”
He thinks a long closure could make it especially difficult for people to get from one side of the harbor to the other during the busy summer months.
“I think it’s just death if they go all the way through the summer with this thing,” he said. “… I hope I’m wrong.”
The city’s Facebook post March 9 said officials have gotten questions about why the work is necessary and why they couldn’t put in a stoplight instead.
The wait time at the three-way junction, which had been controlled by stop signs, averages 1 minute, 48 seconds, and over nine years is expected to be 3 minutes, 5 seconds, “which grows to a problematic level on Stinson,” the post said.
A stoplight would mean regrading at the intersection, which would require a closure as long or longer than the one for the roundabout construction (and would cost more to operate and help less with wait times), according to the city.
“Maintaining and handling the level of growing traffic in our city is a continual effort, and there is, at most times, work happening in several areas of the City,” the post said. “Some require road closures, but we work hard to minimize impact wherever we can.”
