The following is written by Sumner Mayor Dave Enslow:

The past few months, you’ve read a lot here about the need to improve the overpass and lights that make up the SR 410 interchange with our Traffic Avenue and Puyallup’s East Main.

Great news: we have some funding!!  The Governor signed the Transportation Budget that includedState $300,000 of funding for design of the needed improvements.  I really want to thank all six legislators for the 31st and 25th Districts who were supportive, but especially Rep. Drew Stokesbary, Rep. Melanie Stambaugh and Senator Pam Roach.  In additionto this funding, the Port of Tacoma awarded us a Community Economic Development Investment Fund grant as well.

These two new funding partners could not have come at a better time.  Our staff have already submitted one grant request and they’re working on another request for the Puget Sound Regional Council.  Grant funders like to see projects that have many partners and lots of support.  Thanks to the Port, businesses, our legislators and all of you, we’re able to demonstrate a lot of support for this project.  Our goal remains to get money this year to design the solution so that we can ask for construction money and have the project “shovel-ready” in the 2018 grant cycle.

As you may have heard, this project is also an essential part of the process to build the much-needed Sound Transit garage.  Sound Transit is finishing their study to identify environmental impacts that building the garage needs to address, and they want to know if they got everything. It’s quite a long “to do” list already, topped by this very same interchange project.

As we continue to apply for grants, keep your fingers crossed and keep telling us about how important this project is to you through #SumTraffic.