Oak Harbor seeks $4.3 million to add sidewalks on Heller Road

Students heading to Hillcrest Elementary School, teenagers bound for Oak Harbor High School and churchgoers walking to Family Bible Church still face a stretch of NW Heller Road where there are no sidewalks on either side, only narrow shoulders and roadside ditches. For Redwing neighbors, the corridor between NW Crosby Avenue and the north city limits remains one of Oak Harbor’s most obvious pedestrian gaps.

Oak Harbor City Council moved May 12 to try to close it. The city authorized staff to seek about $4.3 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program for a project expected to cost roughly $5.4 million. If the federal money comes through, Oak Harbor would need a 20% local match and would have five years to finish the work.

The proposal goes beyond a standard sidewalk install. City staff want a new 7,760-foot sidewalk on the east side of Heller Road, plus pedestrian lighting, roadway striping, a bike lane and planter strips along the east side of N Heller Road between the northern city limits and NW Crosby Avenue. The aim is to make the corridor safer and more usable for people walking and biking through a part of town that now feels exposed to traffic.

Oak Harbor is also trying again after falling short with the same federal program last year. That earlier application was judged too broad, and city staff have narrowed the new request to a single corridor. The city still needs county support because part of the work lies outside city limits and connects to a county road, so commissioner approval is the next local hurdle before the application can move forward.

The case for the project fits with bigger safety work already underway in Island County. The county’s Comprehensive Safety Action Plan, funded in 2023 through an SS4A grant, uses crash history, community demographics and citizen concerns to guide improvements and ties into a Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2045. U.S. DOT guidance says implementation applicants must have a finalized or updated qualifying safety action plan, and Oak Harbor’s own 2024 Active Transportation Plan backs the effort with sidewalk-gap, pedestrian-crossing stress and bicycle stress analyses.

For residents watching the project, the key milestones are county backing, federal grant approval and the five-year construction window that would follow. If Oak Harbor clears those steps, Heller Road could finally start looking like a corridor built for people as well as cars.