CAMAS — The Camas School District and city of Camas have teamed up to make some safety and traffic improvements near the district’s new project-based learning campus.
The work, which is ongoing, will eventually close off access to the campus from Northwest Pacific Rim Boulevard, put a new traffic light at the Pacific Rim and Southeast Payne Road intersection, add pedestrian crossings and street lighting by the new campus and close off street access from the campus to the Sharp Laboratories of America property.
“We’re all in this together trying to make it as coordinated as possible,” said Heidi Rosenberg, director of capital programs for the school district. “We’ve used similar designers (and) similar contracts so the phasing can work as best as possible and the connection can work as best as possible.”
Sharp used to own the entire property, but the district purchased the former 55,000-square-foot Sharp building and 31.57 acres of surrounding property for $12.5 million in July 2016. The district used the building to house its new project-based learning middle school, Odyssey Middle School, which opened in September 2016, and built Discovery High School, also a project-based learning school, adjacent to the Sharp building and opened that school at the start of this school year.
Money for the campus and construction came from a $119.7 million bond voters approved in February 2016.
As part of the work, the previous entrance to the campus on Pacific Rim will be closed and sidewalked over. A traffic light will be installed at Pacific Rim and Payne, and visitors heading to the school campus will turn there to get to the campus. From Payne, guests will turn from Southeast Lacy Way onto the newly named Northwest Nan Henriksen Drive, named for the former Camas mayor who was instrumental in bringing Sharp to Camas. That road was previously known as Sharp Drive.
“We wanted to name our property, especially since the Sharp entrance is separate from our property now,” Rosenberg said. “She was the reason that Sharp campus and that whole industrial area came into the city. She’s been a great friend to the school district and the city. We wanted to honor her with our section of the roadway being named for her.”
Part of the planning for the work over at that portion of the new campus was to figure out where to make the upgrades. Henriksen Drive runs parallel to Payne, which turns into Northwest 18th Avenue. Payne and 18th are public, city-owned roads, and Henriksen is a private road on the school campus.
“Each part had some infrastructure in place,” said Steve Wall, public works director for the city. “We just tried to make everything equivalent across the whole section. We didn’t want go in and rip up what was in place since it was in good shape. We were both able to utilize the infrastructure in place and save.”
The city’s other major part of this project comes on the opposite side of the campus from Pacific Rim. The city will widen Northwest Brady Road between Northwest 16th Avenue and the Analogue Devices building near Pacific Rim. The city will widen it to fit one lane in each direction with raised medians and left-turn lanes, while making it accessible for bicyclists and pedestrians. That stretch of road is right by Prune Hill Elementary School.
Wall said that project will hopefully go out to bid in early 2019, with construction starting in spring and lasting through the fall. The city received $6 million from the Washington State Department of Transportation’s Connecting Washington program and a $339,000 grant from the Federal Surface Transportation Program for design of the Brady Road project, Wall said. The project is expected to cost around $7.75 million in total, with the remaining funds coming from developer contributions and city funds, according to Wall.
The school district put a new signal at 16th and Brady earlier this year. Rosenberg said the school district worked with the city to make sure all the work they did at that intersection will comply with the city’s needs on Brady as the road widens.
“With any two public agencies, if you can work together and find efficiencies and coordinate on your timing, it builds goodwill and there’s dollars to be saved,” Rosenberg said. “It’s in the public interest for us to work together on our projects.”
