Outgoing Carnation City Council member Stuart Lisk is entitled to have a little fun these days. He’s in his last three months of a 13-year run on the city council, and about to see years of his and the council’s efforts to improve city safety come to fruition.

Mugging for a photo at the intersection of Tolt Avenue and Entwistle Street, Lisk gets a question from a friend—“What are you running for now?”

Nothing at all. He’s simply enjoying one of his last views of cars and trucks zooming unchecked down the state highway that runs through the middle of his town, on Tolt Avenue. Within the next two months, Carnation will have a four-way traffic and pedestrian-crossing light installed at the Tolt/Entwistle intersection, and a signaled crosswalk at the Morrison Street/Tolt Avenue intersection by Carnation Elementary School, built and funded with partnerships with the Snoqualmie Tribe and other agencies.

“I’m done talking about the light,” he  joked. “I’ve been talking about that light for years!”

Lisk estimates that the improvements have been a project of the council’s for about 10 years, as they observed steadily increasing traffic volumes through the city. At the same time, most of the city’s residential growth was occurring down Entwistle, east of Tolt Avenue, which created a bottleneck mornings and evenings for commuters attempting to turn left from Tolt onto Entwistle, or from Entwistle onto Tolt.

“We started partnering with the Snoqualmie Tribe,” he said, “At the time, the tribe had their office there on that corner (of Entwistle and Tolt)” and the two entities shared the same safety concerns.

The state department of transportation was contacted to do a traffic study for the light—“They did multiple studies,” Lisk said, and the council reviewed preliminary designs which were rejected for various reasons. The council also had some work to do in reassuring a public concerned that this would “change the face of the town.”

At times, the project seemed to languish, but the safety concerns never did. Once, the council considered pursuing a signaled crosswalk at Carnation Elementary School as a separate project.“It’s very dangerous to cross that intersection in the morning or afternoon,” Lisk said, and Carnation Elementary Principal Doug Poage agreed whole-heartedly.

“We’re excited, it’s been a long-time coming,” he said.

Because of the school’s location on a curve just as traffic enters city limits, Poage said it’s always been a dangerous intersection.

“It’s just so hard to see, especially for people coming from the north. It’s kind of like a blind corner,” he said. “It wouldn’t take much to make a bad accident.”

Luckily, he can’t recall an accident at this intersection, but he knows of two in the past 10 years, just a few blocks to the south.

Lisk will never forget one of those, since it involved his son, Gibson.

Then a freshman, Gibson was crossing Tolt Avenue near Northeast 40th Street, on his way to baseball practice, when a distracted driver collided with him, throwing him into the air, and leaving him with a dislocated hip and severe bruising that kept him from competitively wrestling until halfway through the next school year.

“He got hit there, just crossing the street,” Lisk recalled, “and one of the reasons I truly believe that happened was we had no safe place to get across the street.

“We’re not talking about crossing Entwistle, we’re talking about crossing a state highway,” he added.

That was four years ago, and Gibson has gone on to graduate from Cedarcrest High School. The city council has gone on to many heated discussions about how to make the traffic signal happen. “If people didn’t feel like I was pushing for it before, (the accident) really motivated me,” Lisk said.

State officials debated whether marked crosswalks would actually improve safety with the council, but the city government continued to pursue the project they saw as a real need for their citizenry. They worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs as well as the Snoqualmie Tribe, the state Transportation Improvement Board, and the Puget Sound Regional Council to line up funding, too.

Finally last spring, “It got to the point where we were able to justify it,” Lisk said.

The new light will open on December 15.