By MIKE JAMES
ASHLAND — The collected pleas of city and county officials from both sides of the river appeared unlikely to budge the Ironton-Russell bridge replacement project from the back burner where it has been cooling for a year now.
Since the Ohio Department of Transportation shelved the project when bids came in prohibitively high, some of the money for the bridge has been shuffled to other construction projects, leaving insufficient funds for even a pared-down design, said ODOT project manager Gary Cochenour Tuesday.
It wasn’t the answer hoped for by those who attended a meeting with Cochenour and other transportation officials. Greenup County Judge-Executive Bobby Carpenter called the meeting hoping to breathe new life into the project, especially in light of the continued deterioration of the existing span, which dates to the 1920s.
The current outlook projects Ohio will be in a position to rebid the bridge in 2013, which means it could be finished by 2017, Cochenour said.
That’s not good enough, Carpenter said.
“We can’t stand that,” he said. “We need that bridge.”
As originally planned, the bridge should have been started by now. But when bids were opened in January 2006, the $80 million budgeted for the project fell far short of the lowest bid of $110 million, Cochenour said.
The gap resulted from a leap in construction costs following the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
A panel of industry experts subsequently concluded that rebidding or tweaking the design wouldn’t significantly cut the cost, he said.
A major change, from a one-tower to a two-tower suspension design, could save enough money, he said. The two-tower design would eliminate sidewalks and bike paths and incorporate other cost-saving design features. It would require Coast Guard approval because it would shift the navigation channel.
In the meantime, however, ODOT also saw escalating prices on other projects, and a portion of the $80 million budgeted for the bridge was diverted elsewhere in the state, leaving $47 million, Cochenour said.
Stopgap maintenance will continue on the existing bridge starting later this year, and it won’t be closed while the bridge-painting project on the Ben Williamson Memorial Bridge goes on, Cochenour said.
The maintenance is intended to keep the bridge safe until it is replaced. The weight limit, which prohibits large trucks, will remain the same, and it still will be subject to closure when the temperature drops to minus 5 degrees.
That’s because the carbon content, and thus the strength, of the aging steel is unknown so authorities want to err on the side of safety, he said.
With the limits and a program of corrosion abatement, the bridge can be kept open and safe until a new span is built, he said.
In addition to the $47 million — 80 percent of which is federal funding — that ODOT has left from the original pot of money, it would take about $25 million more from other funding sources just to get Ohio to consider putting the project back on track, he said.
If “other funding sources” means Kentucky money, that’s not likely, said state Sen. Charlie Borders, R-Grayson, who attended the meeting.
The bridge is an Ohio project and would be entirely owned and maintained by ODOT so “it’s not appropriate” for Kentucky to have a stake in it, he said. “Kentucky can’t make this happen for Ohio.”
Kentucky officials at the meeting were frustrated by the absence of representatives of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland or any other Ohio elected officials.
“They were all on the list. I invited them all,” Carpenter said.
“I’m not feeling the political commitment from Ohio,” said state Rep. Tanya Pullin, D-South Shore. She noted the money pulled out of the project had been diverted to construction in northern Ohio.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2652.
