If you ride the Southworth dock to work, you already know the building is old. The passenger terminal at the end of that dock went up in 1958, which makes it older than the interstate highway system and roughly the same vintage as your grandparents' first car. What you may not know is that the plan to replace it, the one Washington State Ferries put in front of the public back in March, still has no funding to finish the job, no chosen design, and at least two live scenarios that would shut the terminal down entirely while it's rebuilt.
That's the part other coverage of this project tends to skip. The headline has been "new terminal coming." The more useful question for anyone who boards there most weekday mornings is which version of "coming" you're actually going to live through, and when.
What WSF Put on the Table in March
In mid-March, Washington State Ferries opened a public comment period on four pre-design alternatives for the Southworth terminal building. The dock carried more than 825,000 WSF riders in 2025, and it's also served as the home base for Kitsap Transit's Fast Ferry to downtown Seattle since 2022, so the stakes for getting this right are higher than for a typical rural terminal.
The four options WSF put forward were not four flavors of the same idea. They were genuinely different bets:
- Alternative 1, No Build. Required under federal environmental law as a baseline for comparison. Zero construction cost, zero disruption, and the earthquake vulnerability of a 68-year-old timber structure stays exactly where it is.
- Alternative 2, Remodel in place. New piles go in under the existing building at the end of the dock. During construction, passengers lose access to the terminal entirely, and WSF would need to build a separate administrative office elsewhere.
- Alternative 3, New building near the shoreline. A modern terminal sited closer to shore, with administrative space built in from the start. Construction cost lands close to Alternative 2, but the building is expected to age more slowly, which lowers long-term maintenance.
- Alternative 4, Full rebuild at the current site. Also a modern structure, also folding in the admin offices, but built where the old one stands now, which means closing the terminal to passengers during construction. Highest impact and construction cost of the four, with the tradeoff of lower maintenance down the road.
Public comment on those four options ran through April 5. WSF said at the time it expected to finish the pre-design study by that spring and narrow the field to a single alternative before moving into formal design and environmental review.
The Closure Question Nobody's Answering Yet
Here's the detail that gets lost in the "terminal upgrade" framing: WSF's own messaging says there's no expected change to ferry service under any of the four alternatives. That's true, and it's also not the whole picture. Ferry service means the boats keep running on schedule. Terminal access is a separate question, and two of the three buildable options, the remodel and the full rebuild, both require closing the passenger building during construction. Only the new-shoreline option appears built to avoid that gap, since it doesn't require tearing down the structure you'd otherwise be walking through to catch your boat.
If you ride out of Southworth for a daily commute, that's the fork that actually matters to your routine. Not "will the terminal get better," but "will I lose walk-on access for some stretch of months while it happens."
As of the most recent public update we found, from Washington State Ferries' own project engagement page, the agency had not yet posted which of the three buildable alternatives it selected. The page says an engagement summary is coming, but as of this writing that answer isn't public yet. If you're planning around this, that page is the one to bookmark, not a news aggregator that may be working from March's open house announcement.
Why the Timeline Keeps Sliding: A $21 Million Gap
The reason nobody's rushing to lock in a design isn't bureaucratic slowness. It's money.
On May 8, U.S. Representative Emily Randall, who represents Washington's Sixth Congressional District and lives in Bremerton, toured the Southworth terminal with WSF's Director of External Relations. What she heard on that tour is the number that explains the pace of everything else: the project needs $73 million to complete, and only $52 million of that is currently budgeted. That's a $21 million hole.
WSF has applied for $15 million from the federal BUILD program (Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development) to help close it. Randall herself secured $850,000 for the project through this year's Community Project Funding in Congress, which is real money but a small fraction of the gap. Speaking on the tour, Randall put it plainly:
"These trestles, the structure that the ferry comes and parks in, and that you drive on to, are really old."
The timeline that WSF has published reflects that funding uncertainty more than it reflects design preference. Phase one, the terminal building itself, began in mid-2025 and is expected to wrap by 2028. Phase two, replacing the dock and trestle underneath it, isn't expected to start construction until sometime between 2027 and 2029, with the work running through 2031. Randall's visit in May pegged initial construction as "now scheduled for 2027," which lines up with that window, but a schedule built around a grant application that hasn't been awarded yet is a schedule that can move.
None of this is unusual for a public infrastructure project of this size. It's worth knowing, though, if you've been assuming a "new terminal" means a fixed date on a calendar rather than a plan still waiting on a federal grant decision.
What This Actually Changes for Your Commute Right Now
Nothing yet, and that's worth saying directly. The 215-space U-Park lot at the terminal is still running its current rates, $7 for up to 12 hours, $10 for a full day, or $101.01 for a monthly pass, a rate structure that's been in place since May 2025. Kitsap Transit's Fast Ferry to Pier 50 is still running its Saturday-only summer schedule through September, with the same roughly 26-minute crossing it's always had. Route 186 still connects Southworth to the Port Orchard ferry dock, and Route 184 still runs the Harper Shuttle from the free park and ride at Harper Church.
What's worth doing now, if this dock is part of your daily life, is treating the project's public engagement page as your source of record rather than any single news writeup, since the alternative selection and funding decisions are still moving. Watching for the BUILD grant outcome is a reasonable proxy for whether the 2027 construction start holds. And if you're the kind of commuter who plans vacations or work travel around ferry disruptions, it's worth flagging phase two, the dock and trestle work slated for 2027 through 2031, as the more disruptive stretch, since that's structural work under the whole terminal rather than a building remodel next to it.
For a broader look at how the ferry commute shapes daily life in this part of South Kitsap, including the tradeoffs people weigh when they're deciding whether Southworth fits their routine, we've written about that separately on the Southworth neighborhood page.
The honest version of this story is that Southworth residents are living through a pause, not a project. The blueprints exist. The number that decides which one gets built, and whether your terminal closes for a stretch while it happens, is still $21 million short. That's not a reason to worry about your morning commute today. It's a reason to keep an eye on a funding decision that hasn't been made yet, rather than assuming the "new terminal" story is further along than it actually is.
If you're weighing a move in or around Southworth and want a clear-eyed read on how infrastructure timelines like this one tend to play out for property values and daily life in South Kitsap, AnnaLee Baglio has spent more than three decades watching this corridor change one project at a time. Let's connect.
