MOSES LAKE — Upgrades are coming to South Pioneer Way in 2027. Moses Lake City Council members voted to accept a $2.1 million grant to pay most of the cost of rebuilding the driving lanes of South Pioneer Way from Clover Drive to West Broadway. The grant was awarded through the Washington Department of Transportation.  

Levi Bisnett, design engineer for the city, explained that the work covered by the grant doesn’t include the whole street. 

“Pioneer Way is currently an arterial; it’s configured with five lanes. There are two drive lanes in each direction and then the turn pocket in the middle,” Bisnett said. “This will be preserving just the drive lanes, two lanes in each direction.”  

Construction crews will remove the top layers of material and replace them with asphalt, he said.  

The grant does include money for some crosswalk and bus stop improvements, he said. As a result, the sidewalks will be getting some upgrades, too. 

There’s a strip of grass between the sidewalks and curbs on some sections of Pioneer Way, and some of the sidewalks will be widened to connect them with the curbs.  

“We’ll have funds to improve that to ADA compliance, allowing easier access to the bus stops,” he said. “We’ll also be extending sidewalk along (Moses Lake School District) property between Sharon Avenue and Clover. There’s no sidewalk on the east side of the road, so we’ll extend that down and connect to the intersections.” 

Design engineers will be asking the community for any improvements they think should be added to the project, he said. 

The city is using about $500,000 of money raised through the transportation improvement district as its portion. Bisnett said the city does have the option to do more work with its own money.  

“We do have the ability to add on to that, if we wanted to include some of the turn pockets in places,” he said.  

There might be some work that would be easier to do while the road is under construction, he said, citing stormwater drains.  

“If there is any additional (work) - potentially replace a water line or something else, so we’re not having to dig up a brand-new road in five years, we may incorporate those things into the project,” Bisnett said.  

The design portion of the project is planned for 2026, with the goal of advertising the project for bid in fall 2026. City officials will be working to minimize impacts on traffic to and from school, as well as traffic in and out of businesses, which include a lot of medical offices.  

As drivers know, the city is resurfacing most of the downtown main roads and side streets, along with sections of East Hill Avenue and East Wheeler Road. That, too, is being funded mostly through a grant, which required the city to reconfigure the sections that are two lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction with a left-turn lane. City Manager Rob Karlinsey asked if there were any similar requirements in the grant for South Pioneer Way. Bisnett said there were not.