May 13, 2008 8:08 pm US/Eastern
Mass. Wants To Speed Up Bridge Repairs
BOSTON (AP) ―
Gov. Deval Patrick unveiled a bill Tuesday to borrow nearly $3 billion to speed repairs for 250 to 300 "structurally deficient" bridges.
House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi and Senate President Therese Murray are also backing the eight-year plan, which virtually guarantees its passage in the House and Senate.
The bill is a scaled-down version of a plan detailed by Patrick last month that would have accelerated repairs to more than 400 bridges at a cost of $3.8 billion. The governor cited fiscal concerns for cutting his plan.
Patrick said the bill will also create thousands of engineering and construction jobs while saving the state an estimated $1.5 billion in avoided inflation and deferred maintenance costs.
"It's a very robust program," Patrick told reporters.
The list of bridges include the Boston University and Longfellow bridges in Boston, the Fore River Bridge in Quincy, the Whittier Bridge in Amesbury, and the Interstate 91 Bridge in Holyoke.
Work on some of the bridges will begin this summer.
There are currently 543 structurally deficient bridges on state-owned roads. If the state continued at the current pace, the number of bridges in need of repair would increase to 697 in eight years, an increase of 28 percent.
With the borrowed money, the number should decline to 450, a drop of 17 percent, Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen said.
"We are essentially borrowing that money from the future to do repairs less expensively today," Cohen said.
Patrick's original plan included structurally deficient bridges owned by the MBTA and Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.
Those bridges were dropped from the final plan, in part because the agencies have their own sources of revenues in the form of fares and tolls, unlike the MassHighway and the Department of Conservation of Recreation, which rely on state funds to maintain their bridges.
Some of the bridges that will be repaired first are not considered structurally deficient now, but without maintenance would quickly fall into the category, and would cost more to repair at that point, officials said.
State highway officials estimate that the cost of repairing or replacing a structurally deficient bridge is at least twice the cost of conducting preventative maintenance work before a bridge deteriorates.
They cite a Federal Highway Administration estimate that road and bridge construction costs increase between 9 percent and 15 percent each year.
Cohen also said the state will not repeat the mistakes of the Big Dig, which was criticized for relying too heavily on outside contractors to oversee construction.
"We're not going to outsource the brain of the operation," Cohen said.
The plan also won the backing of state Treasurer Timothy Cahill, who had been critical of the level of spending in Patrick's original plan.
Cahill said the revised plan will let the state "fund transportation projects with transportation dollars in a fiscally responsible manner."
The plan will be financed using $1.1 billion in grant anticipation notes, which borrow against anticipated future federal funding and $1.9 billion in gas tax bonds to be repaid with existing gas tax revenues.
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
