Bellingham City Council Public Works and Natural Resources Committee

**Shane Sullivan, on Community Streets Program success:** "So we got over 400 responses so that's good but when we looked closer at them we saw that many of them were not quite eligible for the program... about 68% of these were on arterial streets." **Council Member Anderson, on Holly Street challenges:** "I don't envy your work ahead because knowing we're going to discuss this, I parked on the street, just passed the coffee shop and watched bikes a couple of different times going down the hill and they really pick up speed and champion is definitely an issue because of kind of almost like a double blind spot." **Tim Homan, on arterial street policy gaps:** "That is a current hot topic within public works as well as what do we do about arterial streets? So there will be more to come on that this year, or next year, sorry." **Council Member Liliquist, on program assessment:** "This is great. This is a good government in action and Shane, I'm very glad to see the data will be used el

# Bellingham Public Works and Natural Resources Committee — Traffic Safety, Bike Lanes, and Digital Infrastructure On a crisp Monday morning in December, the Bellingham City Council's Public Works and Natural Resources Committee convened for their regular monthly meeting. Chair Hannah Stone gaveled the session to order at 9:00 AM sharp, joined by committee members Lisa Anderson and Jace Cotton. Council members Hamill and Hathman participated remotely, while Council member Lilacust attended in person as an observer. The committee had four substantial items before them — an update on the city's innovative new Community Streets Program, a progress report on the long-awaited Holly Street bike facility improvements, a telecommunications franchise agreement, and approval for much-needed police department building repairs. What emerged over the next hour was a comprehensive look at how Bellingham is tackling transportation challenges, from neighborhood traffic calming to downtown bike infrastructure to the business of keeping city facilities functional. ## Community Streets Program — A Data-Driven Approach to Neighborhood Safety The meeting's centerpiece was a detailed presentation on the Community Streets Program, Bellingham's new resident-driven initiative for addressing traffic concerns on local streets. Shane Sullivan, the city's Transportation Engineer, walked the committee through the program's inaugural year with evident pride in what had been accomplished. "2025 is the first year of the program, and staff worked with the Transportation Commission to both develop the program parameters and to survey, study, and select projects for the first program area," Chair Stone explained in her introduction. The program represents a significant shift toward community engagement in traffic planning, allowing residents to identify safety concerns and prioritize improvements in their own neighborhoods. The numbers told the story of both success and challenge. Over 400 residents responded to the program's online survey during its May-June window, but as Sullivan explained, "when we looked closer at them we saw that many of them were not quite eligible for the program either for — you see about 68% of these were on arterial streets, so the CSP program focuses just on non-arterials." This finding highlighted an ongoing tension in transportation planning. Council member Stone observed, "I feel like this is an ongoing tension. I don't know if it's a misunderstanding from members of the community, or if there's something that we can or should do to clarify like what are our materials and how those are treated within our transportation planning." Sullivan acknowledged the communication challenge: "In Bellingham, every city calls their non arterial something different. They can be local access street, local street. We call them residential streets which is kind of confusing because we have residents on arterial streets as well. So in this case, residential street is the legal classification and it's a non arterial street." After filtering through the responses, the city identified 53 eligible locations that condensed into 20 discrete study areas — all within the program's capacity to examine. "That means that we were able to study all of the eligible locations. So there was no survey response that there was nobody that put in a concern that didn't get study. That was eligible for the program," Sullivan emphasized. The data-driven approach yielded four priority projects for implementation: **Project 1: Tremont Avenue** emerged as the clear priority. Sullivan reported that this location "had the highest speeds and volumes out of any study location and it's functioning. We feel that it's essentially functioning as an arterial street but it's a residential street." Council member Anderson expressed relief about this selection: "I know people who live out by Tremont, and I'm sure they're going to be thrilled to have some remedy to the speeding in that area, especially to high traffic." **Project 2: McGrath Road** presented an interesting case study in the importance of timing data collection correctly. "We studied it in October, or sorry, in August. And we saw that the volumes were not super highs about what we would expect, and the speeds were not particularly high either. But when we looked at all the survey responses, we saw that a lot of the concerns were around school children and particularly around school times," Sullivan explained. "So we actually did follow up counts in September after school's in session and we saw the volumes tripled and the speeds increased by 25%." **Projects 3 and 4** involved Silver Beach area streets and a quirky operational issue near Silver Beach Elementary School that could be addressed with low-cost signage improvements. Anderson raised concerns about the locations that didn't make the cut: "some of these other ones here that ranked pretty close in need, And there's not the funding. How do you perceive maybe in the future addressing some of those additional projects?" Tim Homan, Assistant Director for Transportation, explained their broader strategy: "we are trying to be responsive in a couple of other ways by routing people to some other programs that might be lower cost or more, you know, community driven. and one of those is the neighborhood projects as well as the tree program." He also mentioned developing "our traffic safety pledge program in 2026. a lot of these complaints were centered around speeding and so I think we're hearing that and we're looking to develop a program where the neighborhood can work as you also saw in Shane's presentation a lot of these we get the kind of the same complaint from multiple people in the neighborhood so I think that's why we're looking at the the pledge program where a neighborhood can and kind of join together and commit to not speeding themselves." Council member Lilacust offered a contrarian perspective on refining the program's scope: "I'm going to suggest a contrary view about not revising the questions and how you approach it too much, because if you do that, you may not get those 68% ineligible answers, but you just told me they're really valuable. So maybe don't drive away all those arterial answers." The program's timeline has the selected projects moving into design over the winter, with construction planned for summer 2025. Meanwhile, the program will expand to Group B — the Birchwood, Columbia, and Sunnyland areas of western Bellingham. ## Holly Street Bike Lanes — Balancing Safety, Commerce, and Connectivity The Holly Street bike facility discussion represented years of planning, pilot projects, and community engagement coming to a head. Tim Homan presented the update on what has become one of Bellingham's most complex transportation planning challenges. "Holly Street, we are currently in the midst of an alternatives analysis on a long-term solution for implementation of bike lanes on the Holly Street corridor," Homan began. The project has a long history, dating back to the 2014 Bike Master Plan, moving through a pilot project implemented in spring 2024, interim improvements installed at the end of summer 2024, and now toward permanent solutions. The technical challenge is significant. The corridor is divided into six segments, each with unique constraints. "The biggest element of the alternatives analysis is to divide the corridor into six different segments," Homan explained. Segments 1 and 2 — from Ellis to Bay Street — already have interim bike lanes in place and are showing positive usage data. But segments 3 through 6 present increasing complexity. "Section 3 is the beta champion where the one-way ends and that gives us a little bit of a challenge there. Transitioning the bike lane with regard to the traffic being one-way and then becoming two-way," Homan noted. The Bay to Champion transition zone has emerged as particularly problematic from both operational and safety perspectives. The Whatcom Creek area (segment 4) faces commercial access challenges, as Homan described: "there's a fair amount of commercial properties there and not a whole lot of parking that is available to them. Their majority of their parking is on Holly Street." Council member Anderson raised pointed concerns about the preliminary recommendations: "I don't envy your work ahead because knowing we're going to discuss this, I parked on the street, just passed the coffee shop and watched bikes a couple of different times going down the hill and they really pick up speed and champion is definitely an issue because of kind of almost like a double blind spot." She was particularly concerned about a potential recommendation to extend the one-way traffic pattern: "one of the things that you just stated, and I'm looking at a map here about perhaps extending the one way, that's going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on across street which would be central avenue to get over towards rotor because that is a a main way people across the town to get to Fairhaven from the Eldridge area." Anderson also worried about the impact on businesses dependent on street parking: "I worry about a couple of those businesses that are dependent on street parking like the waterfront and the building that has antique stores because they don't have any off-street availability and not everybody is as mobile to walk five, six blocks where parking might be available up on the hill." The parking utilization data revealed what planners expected: high usage downtown (where bike lanes already exist) and in the Whatcom Creek commercial area, but lower utilization in Old Town and the West End where there are more alternatives. Homan acknowledged the downtown-wide complexity: "we're just about to engage on a downtown transportation study. Actually, I'm gonna stop calling that and call it what its true name is gonna be, which is the Downtown Connections Plan." This broader study will hopefully inform the Holly Street decisions. One of Homan's more surprising revelations concerned the preliminary recommendation to remove parking on Holly Street's westernmost segments: "once we transition across a creek into old town and on the west end, we're very seriously looking at removal of parking on that, that western Lee 2 zones that we've already talked to the old town developer about that, they're well aware as well as there other businesses all up and down the corridor are aware of what's happening." Council member Cotton declared himself "a one way street skeptic. I think the speed that that can create is hard to design solutions for." He emphasized the importance of consistency across all six segments for rider confidence: "thinking about some consistency across that entire six segments, even if that means some harder conversations about making that connection is pretty important." The alternatives analysis is expected to be completed in spring 2026, with design work and construction to follow based on available funding. ## Digital Infrastructure — Corporate Reorganization Meets Local Franchising The committee's third item involved approving a franchise agreement for Forged Fiber 37 LLC, a newly created subsidiary of AT&T. Mike Wilson, Assistant Director for Engineering, explained the corporate background: "it appears that corporate transactions are happening between Lumen and AT&T and within AT&T creating a new entity that's going to be providing the more of the wholesale service end of things. So it's not necessarily an indication that a new provider is coming to town. It's just some reorganization behind the scenes." The franchise represents standard municipal business — allowing a telecommunications company to operate in city rights-of-way — but Council member Anderson raised questions about the adequacy of the $100,000 performance bond for a company with no operational history in Washington state. City Attorney Matt Stamps explained that the bond amount "is double our normal bond rate due to that fact. It's normally 50,000 and here we doubled it to 100" specifically because Forged Fiber was a new entity. The discussion revealed the limited negotiating power cities have with telecommunications franchises. "State laws mentioned, I think, in the staff memo precludes franchise fees for telecom," Stamps noted. "And also, city code going a long way back has required that the city offers substantially similar terms to substantially situated operators." Council member Lilacust used the opportunity to flag a broader policy concern about underground utility requirements. He described a situation where a resident was negatively impacted by aerial telecommunications lines when underground installation might have been feasible. "Someone feels very harmed by utility lines, telecommission lines going directly in front of their picture window five feet away," he explained. Current city code requires underground installation for new telecommunications facilities only when all other utilities in the area are already underground — a much lower standard than the "underground where possible" language in the city's new comprehensive plan. "I would like to flag that as a work item at some point for the city," Lilacust said, asking Stamps about the appropriate process for requesting policy review. The attorney acknowledged the concern and noted the need to "triangulate the comp plan and then also the BMC-13-15, and then for the third leg there are state law." Despite the policy discussion, the franchise approval was routine. Anderson moved approval, and the committee passed it 3-0. ## Police Department Repairs — Basic Building Maintenance The final agenda item was refreshingly straightforward after the complex transportation discussions. Carol Rothgaard from Internal Services presented the contract award for exterior repairs to the police department building. "The Bellingham Police Department exterior repairs will correct efficiencies in the facade of the main police building that are allowing water intrusion as well as correct efficiencies in the flooring throughout the main internal hallways," the agenda description explained. The project had an interesting backstory. "This is a rebid of a project. We ended up rejecting the initial project because it was significantly over the engineer's estimate," Rothgaard explained. After revising the scope of work, the city received six bids, with Summit Construction Group of Bellingham submitting the lowest responsive bid of $1,504,200 — very close to the revised engineer's estimate of $1,475,860. Council member Anderson appreciated the successful rebidding process: "I'm just really happy this work is going to be coming forward as much needed. Our officers and staff there deserve to have a building that is structurally and I mean I I know it's structurally sound, but the façade and stuff definitely needs the work." The contract award passed unanimously, 3-0. ## Closing & What's Ahead As the Public Works and Natural Resources Committee concluded its business, the meeting had covered the full spectrum of municipal infrastructure challenges — from innovative community-driven traffic safety programs to the complex engineering and political challenges of downtown bike infrastructure, from corporate telecommunications reorganizations to basic building maintenance. Chair Stone noted that the Holly Street study would return in spring 2026, while the Community Streets Program would begin its second year cycle with the western part of Bellingham. The committee's work reflected the ongoing challenge of balancing competing interests — safety versus convenience, bikes versus cars, community needs versus budget constraints — that defines municipal governance in a growing city. The meeting adjourned at approximately 10:00 AM, with the Public Health, Safety, Justice and Equity Committee scheduled to begin their session at 10:10 AM under the leadership of Council member Hamill.