Wilkens to state panel: Wenatchee’s bottlenecks are bridges — and the fix will take more than one project

WENATCHEE — Speaking to the Washington State Transportation Commission on a two-day visit to the valley, Chelan-Douglas Transportation Council Executive Director Jeff Wilkens sketched a region that works well together, grows steadily, and faces a deceptively simple mobility problem — there are two river crossings doing nearly all the work.

“Commissioners, welcome to Wenatchee Valley,” Wilkens began, thanking the group for holding a meeting here and “providing us with an opportunity to share our work and share our priorities and showcase our transportation projects.”

From there he laid out the picture his council has been assembling with cities, counties and state partners for more than two decades: A metro area of about 125,000 that is not tied to the interstate system, hemmed by steep slopes and rivers, with most trips made by locals. That geography concentrates travel on State Route 285 and its bridges — the Senator George Sellar Bridge on the south end and the SR285 and US-2 bridges at the north.

Two chokepoints, one “island”

Wilkens described Wenatchee as “effectively an island,” bounded by the Columbia to the south and east and the Wenatchee River to the north, with mountains on the remaining sides. The Sellar Bridge is already operating at peak-hour capacity, he said, and the model shows it “would operate at least eight hours a day at full capacity by 2050.” The north bridge rarely fills — not because demand isn’t there, but because the north-south streets that feed it can’t move enough vehicles to make it a relief valve without expensive widening on both sides of the river.

The stakes go beyond commute times. Collisions on 285 routinely snarl access for ambulances headed to Confluence Health, and wildfire evacuation is a standing worry. During 2015’s Sleepy Hollow Fire, Wilkens noted, winds shifted and “in 45 minutes it was coming over the hill and burning the houses down,” a reminder that two bridges are a fragile lifeline for 45,000 people on the core Wenatchee “island.”

Safety and preservation under pressure

Like the rest of the state, serious crashes have trended the wrong way locally. Most money in the near-term pipeline is aimed at safety fixes and access management on 285, not lane-adds. Preservation is the other stress point. Wilkens’ new regional plan, adopted last week, estimates local agencies are “less than 50% funded” for roadway preservation needs, while the WSDOT share in the two-county region is closer to a quarter of what’s required.

He pushed back on the perennial “improvements vs. preservation” tug-of-war, arguing the pie itself has to grow. Even if locals lean on every grant program available, he said, preservation at state scale remains a state-level problem.

Freight comes by 97 and 28 — and winter matters

The region’s freight picture is dominated by two gateways to I-90: SR-97 over Blewett Pass and SR-28 through Grant County to George. Both carry significant and growing volumes. Blewett’s winter reality is a constraint even with strong WSDOT maintenance, and SR-28’s two-lane, winding geometry is forecast to approach capacity within 20 years. Being “at the end of the cul-de-sac,” Wilkens added, also means more one-way loads and empties — a logistical cost local shippers live with.

No interstate — and what that means

Wenatchee is one of just eight U.S. metros not connected to the Interstate Highway System or to a four-lane, interstate-standard state route. That absence shapes the economy. You won’t find much national big-box expansion here, Wilkens said, but the flip side is a fertile environment for small, locally owned businesses and entrepreneurs.

Confluence Parkway: Funded, then blown apart by inflation

The commission toured pieces of the Apple Capital Loop program in the morning. In the afternoon, Wilkens walked through the hard part. In 2021, the region won a $92 million federal INFRA grant, then added $85 million from Move Ahead Washington, completing what was supposed to be a one-piece Confluence Parkway build with two new pedestrian/bike connections on the south end. Then construction inflation hit. “Seventy percent construction cost inflation basically blew the full funding package apart,” Wilkens said. The result was that the bridge over the Wenatchee River and the north end of the corridor are no longer funded, and the city has had to phase what was designed as a single project into four pieces.

Third-bridge talk — cautious, but active

With the north-end solution partially unfunded and the south bridge straining, the council has started a cautious, data-first look at a potential new Columbia River crossing. A first-round screen of locations showed the greatest congestion relief would come from a parallel crossing next to the Sellar Bridge. A far-southeast Malaga–Rock Island option scored well for public safety and industrial growth, but delivered little relief to SR-285 volumes without major upgrades to the Malaga–Alcoa Highway. A second-phase alternatives analysis — including a “no-build” scenario and transit/mode-shift options — will follow if the council can land planning dollars.

“We’re not ready to say we need a new bridge,” Wilkens told commissioners, but the modeling work is underway, including a microsimulation of what all-day saturation on the Sellar Bridge would do to downtown Wenatchee and the arterial grid.

Trails as transportation, not just recreation

One project moving briskly is the Chelan-Douglas Pathways Master Plan, an effort to extend the Apple Capital Loop Trail into true intercity connections: Wenatchee–Cashmere–Leavenworth, Wenatchee–Malaga, East Wenatchee–Rock Island, and Chelan–Manson. The council is taking all four corridors to 10% design this year. With abandoned rail beds largely unavailable, most alignments run near state highways on separated paths. Public interest has been strong — more than 1,800 survey responses so far — and e-bike growth is broadening who can realistically commute on a bike in a valley with hills.

Transit resilience and electrification

Link Transit, Wilkens noted, is above 2019 ridership and has been a statewide pioneer in bus electrification since a 2009 Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant. The valley’s ridership profile — less focused on peak downtown commuters — helped it rebound faster than big-city systems after COVID.

Bottom line

In Wilkens’ telling, the valley’s transportation story is less about one big ribbon-cutting than about a sequence. First, finish Confluence Parkway, then harden safety on 285, preserve what we’ve got, extend trails where they move real trips, and keep working the third-bridge question with real data. The regional habit that has made progress possible — “a really good tradition here for 20-plus years … of good regional collaboration” — will need to keep paying dividends as the Sellar Bridge’s clock runs down.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media