Silver Crest Drive Still Has No Sidewalk. The Holdup Isn't Paving, It's Pipes.

If you've walked or biked the stretch of Silver Crest Drive between 26th Avenue SE and 35th Avenue SE, you already know where the sidewalk ends. It just stops, and whatever is on foot or two wheels has to share the shoulder with traffic until the next block picks the sidewalk back up. The city has known about this gap for a while. What most residents don't know is why fixing it has taken this long, and it isn't because nobody got around to pouring concrete.

Mill Creek's own capital projects page still lists the Silver Crest Drive Reconstruction as "Planning," with a start date of April 1, 2025. That's a year and a half of planning for a project whose scope, on paper, sounds straightforward: sidewalks, bike lanes, and a storm drainage upgrade along one residential street. The real explanation is that this isn't one project. It's two, running through the same trench, and neither one can finish without the other.

Where the Gap Actually Sits

The city describes the work as closing a hole in Mill Creek's bike and pedestrian network along that specific segment of Silver Crest Drive. That framing matters. Mill Creek has built its identity around connected trails, most visibly the North Creek Trail that threads through the city's park system, and residents are used to the idea that you can walk most places here. Silver Crest Drive is one of the exceptions, a street where the sidewalk simply hasn't caught up to the rest of the network, and the storm drainage system running under it needs upgrading at the same time.

That second detail is easy to skip past, but it's the reason this project has stalled in planning for so long.

Two Agencies, One Trench

The city isn't the only outfit with equipment scheduled for this stretch of road. The Silver Lake Water and Sewer District is replacing the existing water main and installing a new sewer main in the same project footprint, and the two efforts have to be sequenced together. You don't pour a new sidewalk over a street that's about to get torn open again for pipe work, and you don't leave old water and sewer lines in place under a rebuilt roadbed if you can avoid it. The city has been explicit that close coordination with the water district is required to keep the utility work and the street improvements moving on the same timeline.

Here's what that actually breaks down to:

Two agencies, one trench, one shared timeline. That's most of the reason "planning" has lasted this long.

Neither side can lock a construction schedule until the other's design work is settled, which is a slower process than most residents picture when they hear "road project."

Why "Planning" Has Outlasted a Full Year

Mill Creek's city council has kept working on this project's paperwork well into 2026, more than a year after the official start date. Council minutes show a 6-0 vote to amend the 2025-2026 biennium budget specifically to increase the Road Improvement Fund's expenditure allowance for the Silver Crest Drive rebuild, alongside a separate 6-0 vote to authorize changes to the professional services agreement with Psomas, the engineering firm handling the street design. Both of those votes are budget and contract moves, not construction milestones. They tell you the design is still being adjusted and funded, which means a construction bid hasn't gone out yet.

Worth clearing up while we're here: search "Silver Crest project Mill Creek" and you'll likely land on two different listings that get confused with each other. Silver Crest Park Rehabilitation is a separate project, already marked "Completed" on the city's tracker with a 2023 start date. It refreshed the park's amenities and improved accessibility to the play area. It has nothing to do with the street reconstruction a few blocks away, which is still very much in progress on paper only.

What the Open House Is Actually For

The city has posted a notice inviting residents to a Silver Crest Drive Reconstruction Community Open House, part of the standard process before a capital project like this moves to construction. If you live along or near this stretch, this is the point in the process where your input still shapes what gets built, not after contracts are signed.

A few things worth asking when you go, based on what's already documented about the project:

• How the city and the water district plan to sequence utility trenching against the sidewalk and bike lane work, since that sequencing is what's been holding the timeline
• Whether on-street parking or driveway access will be affected during the utility phase, given that both a new water main and a new sewer main are going in
• What happens to mature landscaping or street trees along the corridor once the storm drainage upgrade starts
• Whether the city has a realistic construction start window now that both the budget amendment and the Psomas contract changes have been approved

The exact date and format of the open house can shift, so the most reliable move is checking the project's page directly on the city's site rather than relying on secondhand event listings.

The Slower Truth About Infrastructure

None of this is unusual for a project that involves two separate agencies and underground utility work most residents never see. It's just slower than the language of a city newsletter update makes it sound. "Planning" on a capital projects tracker doesn't mean nothing is happening. It usually means the boring, necessary parts, budget amendments, engineering contract revisions, utility sequencing, are still being nailed down before anyone breaks ground.

For residents near Silver Crest Drive, the practical takeaway is patience paired with attention. The sidewalk gap isn't being ignored. It's tangled up with a water main and sewer main that both need to go in before the surface work can be finished for good. The open house is the moment to ask the sequencing questions above and get a straight answer on timing before the next council recap moves on to something else.

I keep half an eye on projects like this one because they shape what it actually feels like to live in a neighborhood, long before anyone's thinking about buying or selling in it. If you want more of this kind of ground-level Mill Creek coverage, including the bike routes that run through the city and the parks and trails that make up daily life here, it's all on the Mill Creek neighborhood page at Becca Locke.