Reconstruction of Southwest Moody Avenue is creating a bump in the road … intentionally.

By this fall, work will be substantially completed. When it’s done, the road will be higher in the middle and have an at-grade crossing with light-rail tracks as they approach a new transit bridge nearby. The road also will include three traffic lanes and bike and pedestrian facilities.

A 1,500-foot-long section of Moody Avenue is being elevated to 15 feet in the middle and then sloped so that each end is at its present height. The road is being framed between walls, which will be filled with 30,000 cubic yards of a lightweight concrete material. Also, that under-road area will be filled with 150,000 feet of conduit.

“It’s about a $30 million project, and $7 million of that is being spent on electrical,” Stacy and Witbeck Project Manager Bill Bruce said.

The road will have two streetcar tracks and a crossing with light rail, and both have intensive utility needs. Moody Avenue also is the main utility line to the South Waterfront District and the new OHSU Schnitzer campus, so the amount of wires, vaults and foundations that need to be installed is double the amount needed for a typical street project, Bruce said.

Usually, utilities are installed by excavating through existing ground, but because Moody Avenue is being built up, crews are installing utility infrastructure as they pour the road itself.

The “fill” beneath the road is a product called low-density cellular concrete: a mixture of concrete, water and foam poured like a liquid through hoses. When it solidifies, the material is strong enough to hold up the street, but is one-fifth the weight of normal concrete.

Low-density cellular concrete is typically used in projects where there is concern about a surface or fill settling under the weight of a project. It has been used for highway on- and off-ramps and to fill abandoned underground tunnels, but not as the base for a new road, Bruce said. It’s ideal for the situation, he added, because it’s lightweight and less expensive than alternatives such as foam blocks or pumice stone.

Crews will finish pouring fill and layering in the underground utilities in the next two weeks, Bruce said.

“As fill gets completed, it will turn into a normal street project,” Bruce said.

Bruce expects that the road will be open on Oct. 31. But finishes, such as planting new trees along the road, will still be needed.

The swift-moving project is being funded by the federal stimulus money and TIGER grants, which impose a strict schedule. Construction also is taking place directly in the way of a busy traffic lane.

“It is a fairly disruptive project when it comes to South Waterfront,” Bruce said. “South Waterfront is traditionally a hard place to get to, and the longer this project goes on, the more prolonged that aspect is.”

To ensure the project schedule is maintained, crews have occasionally worked double shifts and an average of six days a week, Bruce said. When the project is finished, 50 different subcontractors will have logged 125,000 man-hours.

In addition, the landscape of the entrance to the South Waterfront is rising by a few feet, so that underground parking can be added without digging into contaminated soil.

Dan Anderson, a spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said the extent of changes coming to the area is “hard to communicate.” The corridor, including main entrances for buildings, will rise 14 feet by the end of the project. The road also will line up with the new Gibbs Street pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5.

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Employees of minority-owned Raimore Construction work at the site for the Southwest Moody Avenue project.

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The Federal Transit Administration announced today that it has given the Portland Bureau of Transportation a $23.2 million grant to help rebuild Moody Avenue in Portland’s South Waterfront District.

The Moody Avenue project, which should be finished by the end of the year, will integrate streetcar tracks and pedestrian and bike lanes onto a bridge that also will eventually serve the Portland-to-Milwaukie light-rail line.

Work began on the project earlier this month, with a bulk of the funding coming through the grant, part of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery Program.

Overall, PBOT estimates the project will cost $27.8 million. Stacy and Witbeck is the prime contractor.

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Moody Avenue is about to experience a growth spurt – one that will raise its height by 15 feet at its apex over the next year.

Crews from Stacy and Witbeck this week started work on a $27.8 million Portland Bureau of Transportation project to integrate streetcar tracks and pedestrian and bike lanes onto a new bridge that also will serve the Portland-to-Milwaukie light-rail line.

As part of that work, a 1,500-foot-long stretch of Moody Avenue between the Markham and Ross Island bridges will be graded upward to a high spot at Porter Street, which will eventually lead onto the new bridge, said Chris Armes, project manager for PBOT.

“All the roads will be raised in this part of the north Macadam district as part of a project to facilitate new development,” Armes said. “We’re raising the grade to meet the height of the new bridge and also to integrate with the South Waterfront community.”

Through March, workers will focus on moving utilities and streetcar tracks out of the way so that grading work can begin, said Bill Bruce, project manager for Stacy and Witbeck.

Then, from April through July, the company will put in a new, low-density cellular concrete fill to raise the height of the road.

And finally, from August to November, the company will construct the top of the fill, add two streetcar tracks – one northbound and one southbound – build pedestrian walkways and bikeways and integrate everything to meet with the new bridge, he said.

“If you spend any time on Moody now, you’ll notice more pedestrians and bikes than vehicles,” Bruce said. “It’s really a continuation of the waterfront esplanade. It’s fitting that in the final design the road will have large pedestrian walkways on both sides.”

The low-density fill that workers will use is atypical for this sort of project – it’s usually used for approach ramps on highways. But it’s faster to install than a more typical, high-density, heavy fill that can take six to 12 months to compress, Bruce said.

Project money from a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant will sunset at the end of the year, Armes noted.

“We have a year, and we expect everything to be finished by February 2012,” said Armes, who added that City Council gave final approval for the project on Dec. 15.

The project will integrate with the planned Oregon Health and Science University Schnitzer campus that would be built between Moody Avenue and the Willamette River, Armes said.

The road goes over a brownfield area, but raising the grade will let the university build a new parking structure or other features without disrupting the site, she said.

“We’re creating an area where we could build a parking structure that won’t require any excavation,” Armes said.

Any soil moved by Stacy and Witbeck will be taken care of according to Department of Environmental Quality standards. Most of it will go to a landfill in Hillsboro, Bruce said.

In February, the company will probably reroute northbound traffic on Moody Avenue to accommodate the work. Southbound lanes will continue, with some possible short closures on nights or weekends. The final tie-in in November could lead to a few more significant shutdowns of the road for a few days to a week, Bruce added.

“The finish line will be when all modes of traffic are up and running on the new fill, which we expect to finish in November,” Bruce said.

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If they hurry, city and Oregon Health and Science University officials have a chance to develop a district energy system for the South Waterfront. If they wait, the chance could pass.

District energy provides heating and cooling to an entire district, allowing individual buildings to tap into the system. The planned OHSU Schnitzer campus, between the Ross Island and Marquam bridges, would use such a system.

Brian Newman, OHSU’s director of campus planning, development and real estate, sees an opening, literally, with the city’s upcoming Moody Avenue project.

That project will widen and realign Southwest Moody Avenue, add a cycle track and realign and double streetcar tracks, allowing for an eventual connection to the new transit bridge. While the roadway is torn up, Newman wants to reserve tunnels that will eventually carry the district energy system’s pipes.

“Even though that corridor would be built well before we have a system in place, we want to reserve that capacity now,” he said. “Moody is our only chance of getting that done in the near future.”

Federal funding rules require the Moody project to be completed by February 2012; the district energy system could still be in design at that point.

“We can’t wait for this all to resolve itself,” Newman said. “If we can at least get them to resolve the tunnel, we’ll have the luxury of having more time.”

The Portland Development Commission and OHSU are each contributing $25,000 to an effort, starting next week, to get a better sense of the scope of the district energy project. That process will last six to eight weeks, with a feasibility study and design work requiring 12 to 18 months.

A $540,000 federal House Committee on Appropriations request for money would pay for that feasibility and design work. The system would cost at least $15 million to build, according to that request, which is before the committee.

Chris Armes, project manager for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said Moody project planners will do what they can to accommodate the district energy system. But they’re in a hurry: the Moody design contract goes to City Council next month, and the city will seek proposals from construction managers-general contractors this summer.

“It depends where they’re at with the master plan for the north part of the district,” Armes said. “We’ll incorporate as much as we can, but we’re in the process of looking at the utilities, and where they fit in the streets, and where we’ll be on Moody.”

District energy systems have been used in one form or another for centuries, said John Sorenson, executive director for N2e, a nonprofit energy-system developer. The systems not only transfer energy efficiently, but also provide huge benefits for building owners.

“You don’t have to build into your structure things like boiler rooms and doghouse units on the roof for cooling, and you don’t have to pay for maintenance of those units,” Sorenson said. “Then you have more commercial space you can sell.”

For the South Waterfront, it’s important to get participation from everyone in the district, said Lisa Abuaf, central city manager with the PDC. “This has to be something that adjacent property owners buy into,” she said.

“How we can get buy-in up front, how we get the major institutions, the major stakeholders involved.”

For the developed part of the South Waterfront District, that didn’t happen in time, Newman said. A district energy plan would have served that entire area, but development pressures were too great five years ago.

“It was a different world,” he said. “The economy was strong, and condo builders in particular wanted to take advantage of the market.

“No one wanted to spend the time it took to get district energy,” Newman said. “They just wanted to start moving dirt.”

Those same pressures won’t hamper the next phase of South Waterfront development, he said. “The luxury of the recession is that we have time to answer some of the larger policy questions we didn’t have before.”

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When a federal stimulus program offered grants for transportation projects that create jobs and provide a long-term boost for the economy, Portland had a team ready. Called the Innovation Quadrant, it included the area’s biggest players in higher education as well as public agencies, private companies and nonprofits.

The Innovation Quadrant plan would link three main project sites by improving the rail and roadway systems between the southern end of downtown Portland and the inner eastside. One of those sites, Moody Avenue in the South Waterfront, received a $23 million federal grant.

The other two sites got nothing from the federal program. That left planners scrambling for a way to keep the projects alive.

“We’re redoubling our efforts to figure out how to get both of those projects to still move forward,” said Art Pearce, senior project manager with the Portland Bureau of Transportation.

One project would shift streetcar tracks from Southwest Montgomery Street and Fourth Avenue through the site of the future Oregon Sustainability Center. Although the $2 million in stimulus money didn’t come through, Pearce said, there’s a pending state Connect Oregon grant that could replace that portion of the project’s $4 million cost.

Although the Oregon Sustainability Center site doesn’t benefit directly from the stimulus grant, everyone involved in the quadrant benefits from the Moody grant, said Mark Gregory, associate vice president for Portland State University. “We kind of got halfway there,” he said.

The total grant request had been $45.5 million.

“The real vision is: You’ve got the educational institutions, OMSI and a part of town with a lot of development capacity,” he said. “How do you turn that into an economic engine?

“Every project that happens in this area has to be put through that lens,” Gregory said. “We’re large institutions. It only makes sense for us to be thinking of ways to work together.”

Another project site, Southeast Water Avenue, plays heavily into the future of the area’s rail systems. Riders would board light-rail trains and streetcars there before crossing the river on a new transit bridge.

Rerouting Water Avenue would make connections easier for commuters, and move traffic around an area where both the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the Portland Opera plan to expand.

The project would cost around $7 million. There aren’t any obvious grant sources that could replace hoped-for federal stimulus money, Pearce said.

Transit agency TriMet plans to build its transit bridge over the Willamette River near OMSI. That bridge ties in with both the Water Avenue and Moody Avenue sites.

Ideally, streetcar tracks would be built at the same time, said Rob Barnard, TriMet project director. For that to happen, money for extending the streetcar system will have to come soon: TriMet this fall plans to issue a notice to proceed for a design-build team for the bridge.

All sides are working to figure out how to include the streetcar system in the project despite the tight budget, Barnard said. “We wouldn’t want to build portions of the bridge and, if funding came after the bridge opened, close it to work on those,” he said.

Despite money being sought independently for each of the project sites, Innovation Quadrant partners see that they all benefit from improvements, Pearce said. Better transportation will turn Oregon Health and Science University, Portland State University and Portland Community College into a seamless campus to produce the ideas and workforce for sustainable jobs.

“The goal is still to see those catalytic projects happening simultaneously,” Pearce said. “People see that it does bolster the work of each of the institutions.”

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Portland’s Moody Avenue street and streetcar realignment project was awarded $23.2 million in a competitive federal stimulus grant announced this morning. The project will help link the growing South Waterfront district with a new transit bridge and with downtown.

Moody will be widened and streetcar tracks will be moved and doubled in some spots. Eventually, streetcars will cross the bridge being built as part of the Portland-Milwaukie light rail project.

Portland had asked for $44 million from the stimulus grant. The total project cost would be $66 million, although planners have said the scope of the project could change based on the money available.

The project is on a tight timeline, with design and engineering proposals due Feb. 25 and design work starting next month. The grant comes with a 2012 completion deadline, meaning construction would need to begin this fall.

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