There’s long been talk about how to make the highway between Kenai and Soldotna safer. But residents along the road have clashed with the state over the best way to do that.
On Tuesday evening, a sizable crowd hunched over three folding tables draped with large satellite images of the Sterling Highway.
The three prints cover an 11-mile stretch between Sterling and Soldotna. The state designated that section a traffic safety corridor in 2009. A recently revived project aims to get that designation removed. Safety corridors are segments of state highways with a high number of fatal and serious injury vehicle crashes.
As people moved from table to table, they were encouraged to annotate the prints with colorful markers. Project leads were available to answer questions and address concerns. Julia Hanson is the project’s design manager and works for the state Department of Transportation.
“It's really helpful because we get that geographic view of what it is they're talking about,” Hanson said. “And a lot of people are telling me — they're pointing out features in the aerial photo and saying, ‘Well, you know, this has changed, or, ‘This is what I'm talking about right here.’ And it's so much easier than having someone say, ‘I live at this address and I have this issue,’ because I can actually — we can both put eyes on it and see what they're talking about.”
Hanson described Tuesday’s open house event as a reintroduction of the safety corridor project for residents in the area.
Work on the project — officially called the Sterling Safety Corridor Improvements Milepost 82.5 to 94 Project — started in 2015. In 2021, the department finished an environmental document that proposed widening the highway. Under that proposal, that section would be widened to four lanes with a depressed median in the middle.
“When we advertised that, we got a lot of feedback, saying, ‘Nope, we don't want this alternative,’” she said. “And we got a lot of feedback about that. And we realized there's a lot of — when we looked at it again, we realized there's a lot of decisions that still need to be made.”
Now, project leads are using a progressive design-build model. The department hires the project designer and contractor, then negotiates the cost. Traditionally, the department designs a project and then hires a contractor, based in part on how much it will cost to build.
The progressive design-build model is what allowed DOT to hold Tuesday’s open house in partnership with the project contractor, designer and public involvement lead.
Jamie Emery lives in the project area, toward the Sterling side, and also drives boom trucks for Spenard Builders Supply. He says some of the projects being considered could be unsafe for large vehicles.
“We’ve got to haul the trusses on a semi and to try to go to, whatever, a U-turn lane up here somewhere and make a U-turn and come back — they're going to be blocking traffic,” he said. “It's going to be an absolute nightmare.”
Emery says he’d like to see a center turn lane for the whole 11 miles and a few stop lights at the highway’s busier intersections.
“In the summertime, when I’ve got a job down Forest Lane, I don't even try to turn left to go back towards town,” he said. “I go right, I go up to Vitus, pull in there, turn, and then come back that way. Because I could be sitting there with 10 cars stacked up behind me waiting to turn because they can go faster than I can. It just takes me a lot longer to get up and get going.”
Project leads also held an open house Wednesday evening for people on the Soldotna side of the project. Hanson — the DOT design manager — said they’ll take pictures of the comment and put them in a searchable database. That will allow staff to find keywords and identify common themes.
The department hopes to start clearing the project right of way in the next two years. The project is dependent on funding and is estimated to cost around $114 million. Of that, the Federal Highway Administration is on the hook for 93% of costs, while the state will cover the rest.
