All about the money

— Before I throw in the towel on the Broadway Bridge-and I suppose I’m going to do pretty much that during the next few paragraphs-I must tell you something.

State Highway Director Scott Bennett admitted to me the other day that the existing bridge could be salvaged, rehabilitated and restored.

There are people who do that kind of work. There are older bridges still vitally in use around the country.

Bennett contended that the long term costs of that would approximate those of a new bridge. He said that the old bridge, once salvaged and rehabilitated and restored, would still present an antiquated surface of narrow traffic lanes and a too-narrow pedestrian walkway.

And that, he said, would not address what he understands to be envisioned by community leaders. That would be a multi-use connector-for automobiles, bicycles and pedestrians-between these sports and entertainment hubs of downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock.

Robinson Center and Dickey-Stephens Park, he means, along with anything else of a fun nature that might spring up over the next century on either side of this rather picturesque panorama.

If it were left to me, we would salvage, rehabilitate and restore. We would worry less about antiquated surface width and more about preservation of the downtown heritage. We would want future generations actually to live with something that the generations before them built and maintained.

There surely are benefits to that kind of continuity in a community.

But now it seems the powers that-be are coalescing around a new Broadway Bridge in the same place. They now face the lone and mere hangup of needing to come up with an additional $20 million in taxpayer money.

Yes, this is going to cost you.

There was front-page news on the issue last week. It was partly mere procedure and partly defining policy.

The procedural issue was that the state could not present its four-year transportation improvement plan to the federal Highway Administration, due October 1, so long as the state version included $57 million for the Broadway Bridge replacement and the local version of the plan listed that project as merely “pending.”

The Highway Department could have taken the project out. But it wasn’t going to do that and let some other state get that $57 million over the next four years. (We only do that kind of thing on Medicaid for poor people.)

The local communities could have left the project pending and trusted that the Highway Department was crying wolf in saying that such a disagreement could imperil all federal highway aid in Arkansas.

Or the local mayors-Mark Stodola and Patrick Henry Hays-could have caved.

That was the ticket.

They don’t think they caved. They think they won concessions-that the Highway Department will build nothing without the cities’ approval and will make the bridge a more attractive signature edifice by having it constructed with two arches instead of one.

The latter isn’t much of an actual concession. The Highway Department said it would build two arches, but that doing so would cost another $20 million or so and the two cities and Pulaski County would have to come up with that.

That is to say that the Highway Department conceded to spend more money if the cities and the county would hand it more money.

The $57 million in federal money only covers the basic absence of imagination of the Highway Department, you see.

One idea for the $20 million is to tap the county and city share of the half-cent sales tax for highways that is contained in a proposed constitutional amendment to be on the general election ballot in November.

Fallback positions in the event the proposal gets drubbed-a distinct possibility-are not apparent.

The upshot is that we will now proceed on all fronts to plan-and construct if we can somehow afford-a new two-arch Broadway Bridge with some biking and walking room.

Mayor Hays does inject one other continuing option. It is that the agreement is on how to proceed and how to design the bridge, not actually to do the project.

“We could still ‘icebox’ the bridge, as the consultant puts it, for 10 years,” which is the existing bridge’s projected period of continued certain safety, he said. And the parties could keep talking during that time.

Perhaps you ask: Whatever became of that plan, so celebrated in this space, by which the mayors wanted to build a completely new bridge a few blocks west at Chester Street?

The Highway Department has the Broadway Bridge replacement planned and approved for $57 million in federal funding. It owns the route. The Chester Street site would require starting from scratch. The $57 million would vanish. And Bennett was telling me that an urban bridge changes traffic patterns and necessitates new and expanded intersections and turn lanes.

They just don’t want to do it.

I appreciate straight answers even when they’re short-sighted.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.

Editorial, Pages 84 on 09/30/2012

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