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City details Transportation Benefit Program: grants have stretched TBP funds for sidewalks and paths
Summary
Eric Mangold updated the council on the TBP, a voter-approved 0.02% sales-tax fund passed in 2022, saying staff has leveraged TIB and Safe Routes grants to reduce the city’s TBP contribution on several projects and will roll remaining TBP funds into future years.
Eric Mangold, the city’s capital projects manager, presented an implementation update for the Transportation Benefit Program (TBP). "As you know or may or may not know, the TBP, the Transportation Benefit District was brought in and passed in 2022. This gave us a point .02% sales tax increase that we could then fund for sidewalk and roadway projects," he said.
Mangold walked council through completed projects (TPP 2 and 3, combined as the 91st Avenue side path) and projects in design or nearing advertisement, including 117th Avenue (in design at 90%), 91st Avenue SE phase 2 (design near 90% and anticipated advertisement next month) and Soberhill Road (conceptual design). He explained staff used TBP seed funding to attract outside grants: for one combined project the TBP estimate was a mix of $606,000 and $808,000, and a nearly $900,000 Transportation Improvement Board (TIB) grant brought the city’s actual TBP contribution down to roughly $450,000 from a planned $1.3 million.
Mangold said the city secured two $800,000 grants (one from TIB and one from the Safe Routes to School program administered by WSDOT) that together represented $1.6 million that reduced TBP obligations. He told council the city currently has roughly $3,000,000 in TBP funds available, expects to spend about $2,200,000 this year, and will roll unspent funds into future projects.
Council members asked for clarifications about cost deltas when grant funding was not available for a particular project and requested an updated implementation table for the TBP expenditures by year. Mangold agreed to coordinate with finance and provide an updated schedule and expenditure table.
The TBP update concluded with staff noting several TBP projects will move into construction this summer if grants and schedules align, and that remaining TBP funds will be prioritized to leverage additional external grants.
