FAQs

The Cloverhill HOA(s) are responsible for maintenance in the planting strip and walls east of Cloverhill adjacent to the roundabout per the Development Agreement. This landscaping maintenance appears to have stopped during construction. The city is instructing the HOA to restart required maintenance which would include removal of weed at and climbing up the walls.

The right-of-way landscaping and trees south of the Wells Dr/Royle Rd Roundabout were removed from the roundabout construction project (Phase 1) for budget reasons. The City is adding this landscaping, plus the west side sidewalk, with the Royle North (Phase 2) project.

According to the Washington State Department of Transportation, roundabouts improve safety, reduce delay, improve traffic flow, and are less expensive to maintain when compared to traffic signals. Due to these benefits, Ridgefield has successfully added several roundabouts in recent years and the City plans to continue using roundabouts at intersections where appropriate in the future. Roundabouts also offer a design opportunity that traffic signals do not: landscaping of the inner circle.

• Slow down, use caution, and follow speed limits when traveling through work zones
• Watch for workers, equipment, signs, and barricades
• Watch message boards for alerts to traffic pattern changes
• Plan for extra travel time
• Prepare for detours and alternate routes

The Royle Road corridor improvement project is a multi-year project, and is divided into three phases. 

Phase 1 (complete): City staff has received a project schedule from the Contractor with the completion date of April 22, 2023.

Phase 2: Construction is estimated to start in the summer of 2023 with a targeted completion date of late 2024.

Phase 3: The City of Ridgefield is seeking grant funding to assist with the cost of the culvert replacement. Funding options are planned to be finalized by 2024.

Yes! Royle Road is being planned for a traffic lane in each direction, a center turn lane at intersections (except at roundabouts), bike lanes in each direction, and sidewalks on each side. When completed, bicyclists and pedestrians will be able to travel without interruption between Pioneer Street and Hillhurst Road.

The project includes several intersection improvements including the roundabout to improve safety, reduce delay, and improve traffic flow on Royle Road. With the plan of a traffic lane in each direction, a center turn lane at intersections (except at roundabouts), bike lanes in each direction, and sidewalks on each side, pedestrians will now have several crosswalks to utilize while traveling without interruption between Pioneer Street and Hillhurst Road.

The City has been actively inspecting the contractors work in the past couple of weeks and requesting they move their vehicles away from the intersection so as not to block sight distance.  If the contractor needs to have equipment in these areas that block sight distance, they are required to have a flagger present.

After encountering some difficulties connecting with power supplies at the existing street lights, the Contractor is actively working with the City, and Clark Public Utilities to get these connected and active as soon as possible.

Since construction started in 2021, there have been a number of challenges to establishing and maintaining a critical path schedule for the project. The amount of utility coordination needed, the complexity of the construction work along with other construction issues resulted in communications between the city and the contractor becoming sporadic instead of regular. This sporadic communication resulted in increased time and costs which are not acceptable if we want to move this project forward. The City has become more aggressive in re-establishing a regular line of communication with the contractor, and actively worked to get a project schedule by February 1. We have received this information and are actively working with the contractor on a completion schedule, which can be found in the timeline section of this page.

One of the largest issues we ran into was with utility providers, and their contractors. Prior to awarding the construction contract, work was already underway to coordinate efforts of utility providers whose overhead lines would be dropped into a joint utility trench as part of the project. However, even with those early efforts, significant project delays were caused by trying to coordinate the work for 14 different utility providers. Many of them wanted to use their own contractors for the work, and some were difficult to even get responses from.

As for what we are doing different as we move forward into the next phases of the Royle Road improvements; the City has already coordinated with those same utility providers to ensure a similar series of delays does not occur.

When the City recognized the need to comprehensively plan for and build Royle Road improvements in 2016, the Council prioritized design work from Hillhurst Road to Pioneer Street, which has been finalized. For construction, instead of relying on a patchwork of developments with partially widened areas in front of their neighborhood (which is all that can be required under State law), Council signed agreements with all the landowners/developers along Royle Road that required them to contribute their share of costs for Royle Road improvements (in addition to the Traffic Impact Fees). The theory was that by pooling those resources, the City could then re-build the roadway as a single project.

Practically speaking, because development has been so intensive along Royle Road since 2016, Royle Road improvements would likely be almost complete if developers had been required to complete them as is the usual practice, however, at the time, we didn’t envision the development happening so quickly. We’ve learned that this falls right in with the Robert Burns quote “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Also, the corridor is complex, with topography, wetland, and creek issues, making it unwieldy as a single project. Additionally, the contributions from each development have not kept pace with inflation, meaning, the City has had to find other money for the project (including a State grant and Traffic Impact Fees). One exception is the section of Royle Road between Pioneer St and the Legacy Trails apartments. For that segment, the City worked directly with the developer for Rosauers who built the improvements using the City’s design.

By breaking up the Royle Road project into 3 phases, it creates more achievable and practical project areas. For funding, it continues to be more efficient to work directly with developers to build more than their necessary improvements, crediting them for the work that can be done cheaper and quicker than a public agency can do it. And if money is pooled for these improvements, the contributions must be inflation-adjusted.

The work completed in Phase 1 is designed to align with the plans for future improvements to the north and south of the project (Phases 2 and 3).