Why Have They Never Paved Columbia Street In Wenatchee?

It's a fair enough ask since the nearly-two-mile-long stretch on the eastern edge of Wenatchee is one of the city's busier corridors for all varieties of vehicle traffic, and is a longstanding Batman route for harried commuters to utilize as a shortcut through town, especially when other primary roads like Wenatchee Avenue and Mission Street are jammed.

Ever since I was a kid growing up in the Valley in the 1970s and 80s, Columbia Street has always been akin to many of the roads that you might find in the older or industrial areas of major U.S. cities like Detroit, Michigan or Cleveland, Ohio. It's battle-scarred and pockmarked from years of ad hoc patchwork and other repairs and looks similar to an abandoned airstrip left over from the Second World War, while riding more like a weathered amusement park ride or a training simulator for excessive ground turbulence.

But even with all of its unlevel surface that's chock full of unexpected dips, deeply-sunken storm drain covers, and interminable zigzag cracks - all of which can easily lay waste to any car's shocks and struts with enough passes, the craggy old concrete street is still used by hundreds of motorists every day, including me. I use it on a routine basis as part of my daily route when driving home from work.

So with all those precious suspension systems and tires riding on its paths with every full rotation of the earth, why then has Columbia Street never been sweetened with the layer of asphalt frosting that its crumbly constitution is seemingly so long overdue to receive?

Well, as I recently discovered, it's actually something the City of Wenatchee has been looking into - and not just in the distant past either. However, re-baking this cake would be quite an undertaking.

"Columbia Street is one of our oldest truck routes in town," explains City of Wenatchee Administrator, Laura Gloria. "It's a concrete street which makes it much more difficult to replace or repair and because it's in such bad shape, it needs to be completely redone. There are often things we can do to more-easily repair a street, but Columbia is in such disrepair that we would have to completely gut it out and redo it."

And if you think "redoing" a street is as simple and jackhammering out the old and pouring in the new, Gloria says to think again.

"One of the other challenges with Columbia is that the utilities underneath it are really old. All of the utilities that are under that street are at least a hundred years old, so if we took off all the existing concrete and redid the street, we would also need to install and repair all of those utilities underneath it. It wouldn't make sense to redo the entire street and leave all of that already-old and aging infrastructure in place."

'Okay, so what's the holdup then,' you might ask. It's just a couple miles of concrete, and that's nothing compared to the bigger projects the City already has in the works, like MegaKittrick and Confluence Parkway.

While that's true, a cost analysis done by the City has revealed that the estimated price tag to completely "redo" Columbia Street - utilities and all, would be a whopping $25 million. And even though anyone and everyone who uses the antiquated passage would no doubt love to see a day when a smooth ride upon its topside is possible, money still doesn't seem to want to grow on trees, and the City would need to raise a lot of it to plant the seeds necessary to make this renovation grow to full fruition.

"The problem of getting that project done is just the amount of upfront funding we'd need," says Gloria. "It would be about $12 million just to do the utilities alone and you never know what we might find once the work gets going, since redoing a street like that is a little like renovating an old house. But it's definitely something the City is interested in starting some momentum for though."

In fact, the City has already given the ol' metaphorical steamroller a push by naming the revamping of Columbia Street as one of the priority projects in its Reimagine Wenatchee masterplan, which was rolled out last summer.

And Gloria says with mounting interest in the revitalization of the city blocks surrounding Columbia Street, it's actually quite likely the effort to finally see it get a freshened finish will eventually prove successful.

"With the Warehouse District and the properties that the (Chelan-Douglas Regional) Port (Authority) owns and a lot of really up-and-coming small businesses that are there already and want to be down there, it has become a key spot in town for economic development and it all ties in with Columbia Street. We're currently trying to identify grant options or perhaps ways of being able to use some of our sales tax revenues to finally get it done. So the ball is already rolling in terms of wanting to do it, but we need to look at what our next steps are in the process and keep that momentum going. It's a really big lift, but we feel at some point, we can get it done."

Until the City is able to garner the financial backing required to make its "big lift" for Columbia Street happen, I suppose we can all be happy that its old concrete foundation is still holding up well enough for all of us to drive on.

Local historian, Fred Harvey, shared with me that all of the streets in Wenatchee were fashioned from dirt until about 1912, when Columbia became one of the first roads in town to be retrofitted with concrete, while others like Wenatchee Avenue were cobbled with brick.

Fred also said that it's his understanding that another reason Columbia Street was never paved was to preserve its historical significance, which even included the retention of its old iron tie rings for horses that were still anchored in and sticking out of the concrete surface as recently as the 1970s.

So when we all find ourselves chuntering while traveling over the toadskin surfaces that have defined the character of our hometown's beloved Columbia Street, just remember that it beats the heck out of treading dirt, and you can also be thankful that motorized horse of yours is a lot faster than the conventional ones that used to line the road over a century ago.