SEATAC, Wash. — The Port of Seattle Commission authorized an additional $822,100 Tuesday for a new cellphone lot at Sea-Tac Airport that has been delayed and run over budget.
The new lot, where people picking up passengers would wait for a call, will hold 200 cars and have better traffic flow. It also will have a QR code so people can scan it with their smartphones to get arrival information on flights coming in the next couple of hours.
But its completion will come barely in time for the start of peak travel season in June.
Out of the entire 200, 14 have been sitting unpaved for the last month, because the soil underneath was not compacting well.
“So what we had to do was spend some extra money, taking that soil out and bringing in more soil,” said Perry Cooper, SeaTac Airport spokesperson.
While that paving has been on hold, an additional strip of pavement next to the lot has been temporarily opened for overflow parking.
Mark Reis, the managing director of Sea-Tac Airport, told commissioners there have been some problems with people trying to wait for arriving passengers.
“We have actually had some issues out there where we've had to have our police department help us out in the evenings, on Sunday evenings, when we've had too many people and too few spaces,” Reis said.
The total authorized budget for the lot so far is $2.2 million, although authorization for either a roundabout or traffic signal at the entrance will bring the project to an amount between $3 million and $5 million.
Reis said the difficulties of the project had to do with rushing the process.
“That time compression is really fundamentally behind a lot of the challenges this project has,” he said.
The rush was because the old cell phone lot had to be torn apart as part of a cargo project. That project, combined with other cargo projects, had to be synchronized to start in April to save the airport $12 million.
Cooper told KIRO 7 the extra cost to the new cellphone lot is far less than the cost savings achieved through the timing of the other cargo projects.
People picking up friends and family told KIRO 7 they had no idea a new lot was under construction and had trouble finding it.
“I think it's great now that I found it, because the last time I came, I sort of missed the signs,” said Betsy McPhaden.
Connie Fuller, who came from Tacoma to pick up a friend, was glad to see a new lot. She said at the old one, “most of the time there was enough space, but there were times when you had to drive around to find a spot.”
Cooper said with the authorization of additional funds, construction crews can be called back to finish the project, likely in the next couple of weeks.
KIRO
