Crews are working on the second phase of a project in Covington that will temporarily cause hiccups in traffic at Wax Road and Southeast 272nd Street, but will help ease a bottleneck for drivers once completed.

Work began in December, Covington Public Works Director Glenn Akramoff explained, with the project really getting moving in January.

Rodarte Construction is “widening the road from Wax Road to Jenkins Creek … adding pedestrian amenities, sidewalks and such.”

Currently Southeast 272nd Street is a two lane road through half of the city, the portion that runs east-west from the Maple Valley city limits up to Southeast Wax Road, where it widens to five lanes.

“We’re also making it so we can do an easier job of U-turns at the Wax Road intersection because of the way we’ve put center medians in,” Akramoff said. “We’re doing some work with the Covington Water District. One of the things we’ve completed in the last couple days … Washington DOT (Department of Transportation) has changed the timing of the light to help with the traffic flow.”

The first phase of the project, which has a $3 million price tag, involved Puget Sound Energy putting about 1,700 feet of power lines underground starting at Southeast 174th Street and terminating at Jenkins Creek.

Akramoff said the cost of the project was split between a $1.14 million Transportation Improvement Board grant and about $2 million from the Washington state Legislature that was appropriated from federal funds.

Eventually, Akramoff said, the city would like to widen Southeast 272nd to five lanes heading east from the Jenkins Creek Bridge to 185th Avenue Southeast. The city would also widen portions of Wax Road to allow for improvements to that street.

The trick to getting to that point, Akramoff said, is finding money to design that project, but the last estimate for that was around $13 million to design it, buy right of way and build it.

Once this project is complete in July, Arkamoff said, “other than a number of smaller storm water projects, we don’t have any (road) projects on our shelf.”

“The focus over the next couple years will be to find money to get back to putting projects on the ground,” he said. “To put $30 million in projects on the ground for a city of 17,000 is a tremendous accomplishment.”