City Of Wenatchee To Reassess Cost Of Confluence Parkway Project

The City Of Wenatchee is preparing for the possibility of significant cost overruns on its massive Confluence Parkway Project.

Mayor Frank Kuntz says the skyrocketing price of labor and materials coupled with the project's five-to-ten-year timeframe has prompted the City to begin thinking about additional ways of raising funds for its completion.

"Based on what we've said we're going to build we think that two-hundred million dollars might be a little short. It really is going to require some more help from the state and the federal government and other grants that we can get, or we're going to have to delay some of the work to different times."

Many comparable large road improvement projects in the U.S. are currently coming in anywhere from ten to thirty percent over initial cost projections.

Kuntz says the monetary scope of the Confluence build will make it impossible for the City to pitch in any of its own money to see the project through to the end.

"When we do a five-million-dollar project and costs are over ten percent, I can go to the City's savings account and we can get five-hundred thousand dollars and we can make that happen. But when your two-hundred-million-dollar project is ten percent over budget, the City doesn't have twenty-million dollars in its savings account to just say 'alright let's just fix this and get it done'.

City of Wenatchee Administrator Laura Gloria says the City is in the process of taking the initial steps necessary to reassess the project's potential new cost based on recent and future inflation.

The project is scheduled to be the largest in the city's history, with a total price tag of roughly $177 million, including $92 million coming via an Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) program grant that the city was awarded in 2021.

Work on the project is slated to begin in the spring of 2025.