SEATTLE — If, in some great museum of American public discourse, there’s a gilded pedestal reserved for the Lincoln- Douglas Debates, then way in the back, in a darkened room that no one tells the docents about, you might find a cardboard diorama of the Benton-Rivers Encounter.
It happened last year on the floor of the Washington state senate. State Sen. Don Benton, a barrel-chested, goateed 57-year- old, says colleague Ann Rivers started the name-calling that made onlookers and pages gawk. She called him a “piece of s—-” and leaned in so aggressively that, he says, he felt physically threatened. In Rivers’ account, Benton stared, laughed creepily and repeatedly called her “weird.” Some weeks afterward, according to a report by colleagues who tried to mediate their dispute, Benton would say Rivers, 48, was behaving like a “trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl.”
The passion of their exchange wasn’t stirred by abortion or gun control, or even partisan differences; both are Republicans. Instead, their argument boiled down to who was best suited to derail a plan for replacing one of the most dangerous major highway bridges in America, a rotting, accident-prone span over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington.
Both lawmakers deserved credit. So did a host of others, people from varied walks of life who together . didn’t come together: Portland bicyclists who hated the project like a lukewarm latte. Mass-transit planners who tacked on an almost billion-dollar light-rail line. Suburbanites who predicted the trains would haul urban crime. And a county commissioner who found guidance in the Bible’s strictures against debt.
As the story behind one of the greatest engineering non- achievements of the 21st century shows, the unbuilding of bridges just might be America’s last great collective undertaking.
Oregon and Washington had spent more than a decade devising a compromise to replace the steel-girded mess on Interstate 5. The structure dates to 1917 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and is too low for the tallest river-going derricks and dredges, so operators frequently have to raise part of the span, halting traffic. Rush hour starts every weekday at 2 p.m., and congestion multiplies odds of a crash as much as fourfold around the bridge, Oregon transportation planners say.
A wider, modern span might reduce accidents 70 percent, boost annual economic output by more than $600 million and add $230 million to local wages, they estimate. Construction of the $3.2 billion Columbia River Crossing was supposed to begin this year, with backing from the federal government, governors of both states, the local chambers of commerce, and more than a dozen government agencies.
And then, gridlock. Washington state lawmakers spurned $1.25 billion in federal funding, at one point publicly rebuking Obama’s Republican transportation secretary when he flew to Olympia to court them.
As a result, drivers on the busiest West Coast trucking corridor encounter this white-knuckle ride just north of Portland: Three 10-foot-wide lanes squeeze into a space fit for two. A humped midsection blocks sight lines. There are no shoulders. One winding on-ramp merges directly with car and truck traffic blowing past at 50 miles an hour.
“You can be pretty, you can have deer and bald eagles, that’s all wonderful – but if you can’t move goods and you can’t get to work in a timely fashion, you send the signal that you’re not serious about economic development,” says Scot Walstra, a county development official in Washington who backed replacing the bridge. He says he and his daughter have both had accidents there.
Bad roads – not to mention lousy rail service, decrepit airports and crumbling water pipes – are becoming as American as high cholesterol. If you lined up all the structurally deficient bridges in the country end to end, they’d stretch from Boston to Miami.
More than one-quarter of urban roads, including 64 percent in Los Angeles, are in poor condition, according to TRIP, a non- profit research group. Just about every major city has a notorious bottleneck. There’s the Orange Crush in Orange County, California, and the Spaghetti Bowl in Wayne, New Jersey. Two places have Mixing Bowls: Detroit and Springfield, Virginia. Dallas is trying to tame the Mix Master into what planners call the Horseshoe.
The Northwest’s I-5 span even has an East Coast doppelganger in the 104-year-old Portal Bridge, which freezes trains from Boston to Washington whenever it swings open for boat traffic.
Things have gotten worse, fast, in the past decade, making any comparison with pristine Dutch airports and Chinese bullet trains even more painful. The U.S. ranked seventh in the world in quality of roads as recently as 2006, according to the World Economic Forum in Geneva. This year it was 16th, trailing such countries as Oman and Spain. Shoddy infrastructure will cost U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion by 2020, the American Society of Civil Engineers says.
One reason for the decay is that few are willing to pay what it takes for better roads. The federal gas tax hasn’t been increased in two decades. The Highway Trust Fund, in surplus as recently as 2000, neared insolvency before Congress approved stopgap financing this year.
In the age of austerity that’s ruled since the Great Recession ended in 2009, many politicians consider the rewards greater for killing projects, as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did when he called off a Hudson River commuter rail tunnel, says Emil Frankel, a former assistant secretary of transportation under President George W. Bush.
Money isn’t the only obstacle, as the protracted fight in the Northwest demonstrates. Disagreements over growth, and the related concerns of pollution, greenhouse gases and density, touch on essential questions of how and where people live. It’s hard to build a road when a strong constituency really wants a bike path instead.
Planners in the Northwest tried to please everyone. For drivers, they designed a new bridge with 10 car lanes and wide shoulders linking Portland and Vancouver, Washington, the city on the Columbia’s opposite bank. Public transit fans would get their own deck in the double-deck structure, with room for bicycles, pedestrians and light rail. Five new interchanges would smooth traffic.
By this year, $200 million of state and federal money had been spent on design work alone, employing scores of engineers, geologists and architects.
The bridge erected here a century ago, still in use as the northbound part of the span, cost $1.75 million and initially had a 15 mile-an-hour speed limit. It was known as simply the Interstate Bridge.
Workers pounded Douglas firs 60 feet into the sandy riverbed and topped them with 10 linked steel sections that today have the look of cages from an old-time circus. A five- cent toll for vehicles and “each person riding on an animal” paid for construction.
A matching span went up next to the original in 1958, part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system – the 40,000-mile network that ultimately cost $129 billion, the equivalent of $1.1 trillion today. The nationwide project was so uncontroversial that it passed the Senate on a voice vote.
In the first decades of the 21st century, building a single bridge over the Columbia would prove a political impossibility.
The distance between Vancouver and Portland isn’t just measured in miles, according to Tim Leavitt, Vancouver’s mayor. There’s also “this inferiority complex that some people have.” To sophisticates across the river, Vancouver is “Vantucky,” a place that doesn’t share their tastes in microbreweries, organic dining and public transit (traits skewered for their whiff of smugness in the “Portlandia” television series).
Leavitt’s city of 167,500, named like its Canadian cousin for the British explorer George Vancouver, has never been the subject of a popular TV show. While some streets have a leafy charm and fine old brick buildings, the first impression is scruffy. Pawn shops, dive bars and used-clothing stores dot its downtown.
The city suffers from a border-economy quirk: Oregon imposes no sales tax, so people have little incentive to shop in Vancouver. For years, most of the development has been in the suburbs, from ranch-style tract homes to McMansions. Leavitt embraced the bridge plan, in part, as a way to end the Vantucky punchlines.
“Downtown businesses will prosper, properties will redevelop, there will be more and better housing options,” says Leavitt, an independent who was once a registered Republican. “So why are they fighting that?”
One reason has to do with demographics. Vancouver and surrounding Clark County are a different sort of tax haven, pulling in retirees and exurban migrants attracted by Washington’s lack of a state income tax. Both groups are particularly hostile to paying tolls, which opponents claimed might cost the typical commuter $1,250 a year. They also traditionally oppose light rail, which was yoked to the project because most of Obama’s promised subsidy came from public- transit funds.
David Madore, an entrepreneur who moved his California motion-controls components company to Clark County in 1990, founded a political action group to oppose what he called “the light rail tolling project” and won election as a county commissioner in 2012. He doesn’t like Portland’s trains.
“You get in this moving room and there is no authority,” says Madore, also a board member of the county transit agency. “A lot of women don’t take it. My wife wouldn’t take it. Our kids wouldn’t.”
The businessman turned politician wears a pin on his lapel: an American flag in the shape of a cross. Faith also informs his opposition to the public borrowing required to complete the new bridge.
“There are proverbs that guide,” he says. “The borrower is slave to the lender, that’s a very foundational one.”
Madore hired a forensic accountant who said contractors were feasting on inflated bids. (Washington’s state auditor investigated the claims and this year reported $1.7 million in “excess or higher-than-typical” costs.) It fueled a perception of the project as a costly boondoggle.
The Columbia River Crossing even spawned an opposition group on Facebook: OMG CRC WTF?
“Light rail is not a transportation solution, but a political ideology designed to change people’s behaviors, reduce freedom of movement and expand the size of government,” Washington state representative Liz Pike, a Republican from Clark County, said in February.
Soon the project had detractors across the political spectrum – in effect, a Green and Tea Party alliance. Many liberals dismissed the idea as a throwback to the freeway-crazed 1950s. Portland had turned against sprawl in the 1970s, converting a stretch of downtown freeway into a public park.
Today, Portland has the highest bicycle-commuting rate in the U.S., accounting for 6.1 percent of trips. At noisy “pedalpalooza” protests against the bridge project, riders shouted and whistled as they hauled a sound system on a bike. One flier urged people to understand “how this project ties in to the Global Free Trade infrastructure plans.”
Two environmental groups sued the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2012, saying the bridge project would increase air pollution and endanger salmon and other river species.
Oregon’s legislature approved it anyway, signing off on the state’s $450 million share of the project in early 2013, with most of its Democratic majority backing the plan to expand Portland’s MAX light rail system while doubling the number of I-5 car lanes near the bridge.
“They were willing to swallow almost anything to get their precious MAX train across the water,” says Bike Portland blog founder Jonathan Maus, 39, who moved from California in 2005 and bought a house in north Portland, not far from where the freeway stood to be widened. Maus commutes downtown, sans helmet, on a gray Dutch-style bike made by the Portland designer Joseph Ahearne.
He’s convinced protests in Portland, among the last in the U.S. to host an Occupy encampment, would escalate. “If this thing happens, there will be people laying down on I-5,” Maus says.
Washington’s state senate made that unnecessary.
A week before Benton and Rivers had their confrontation on the senate floor, Washington Governor Jay Inslee invited then- Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to visit Olympia. It was meant as a chance for LaHood, a former GOP congressman from Illinois, to lobby fellow Republicans to support the bridge, an Obama administration priority.
Seated at a square conference table under the heavy draperies of the Majority Coalition Caucus Room, Benton, Rivers and other Republicans laid into the bridge plan. One lawmaker told LaHood not to interrupt him. LaHood said it was time for legislators to “fish or cut bait.” A Republican staffer recorded the session, and it ended up online. Benton released a statement claiming the caucus had “schooled” the Obama official. “Benton 1, U.S. transportation secretary 0,” the statement read.
“It was a disaster,” recalls David Postman, Inslee’s spokesman.
The majority coalition held, and the legislature adjourned without approving bridge funding. “It’s over,” Benton told reporters. On this, he and Rivers were in agreement. “The reality was a lot of people saw the project for what it was,” she says.
LaHood, for his part, says of Republicans who sunk the project: “Obviously, people without much vision.” It likely will be at least a decade before a replacement is built, says LaHood, a senior adviser at Meridiam, an asset manager that invests in infrastructure.
Standing this week above a Seattle bridge slated for replacement, Inslee proposed a 12-year, $12 billion transportation plan. It didn’t include money for a new I-5 span.
The longer it takes politicians to act, the creakier and more expensive America’s infrastructure gets. All but hidden among the Interstate Bridge’s trusses, a 10-man crew working from a green shack keeps the rusting hulk alive.
“Nothing but grease,” says crew member Mark Rousseau, a burly former trucker, when layers of gunk from a beam stick to a visitor’s hand. Rousseau has scaled 239 feet in a November wind storm to fix a stuck roller in the bridge’s towering lift span. He fires propane cannons most Januarys to ward off thousands of roosting starlings, whose droppings are toxic to moving parts.
In assessments from the National Bridge Inventory, the older, northbound part of the span has one of the lowest ratings of any U.S. highway bridge carrying at least 50,000 vehicles daily. Its sufficiency rating, which takes in such factors as structural condition, average traffic and road width, was 28th- lowest among 18,984 such bridges in 2013, data show.
While Oregon chief bridge engineer Bruce Johnson says the span isn’t in imminent danger, he adds that it’s vulnerable in an earthquake and might cost $600 million to bring up to present seismic standards. The trunnion shafts and rollers need replacing, cracks in the deck have to be patched, and the bearings are rusting. Fixing all that might cost more than $12 million, and at some point, the 25-year-old road decks must be replaced, for $150 million. Just repainting the bridge might cost $75 million.
November’s election of a divided government – in both Washingtons – reinforces the political standoff that’s led only to patching, talking and waiting. Yet there’s rarely been a better time to think big. Average interest rates are hovering close to their lowest since the 1960s. “If you’re ever going to make investments in infrastructure, now is the time to do it,” says Frankel, the former Bush administration official.
In May, Rosemary Krystofiak, 64, a retiree from Nevada, was in Portland visiting her son when she got lost and wound up heading for a curling bridge entrance. Traffic stopped for a bridge lift. Another driver didn’t notice and slammed into her Jeep Cherokee. The rear axle sheared off and Krystofiak’s vehicle plowed halfway over a divider, almost into oncoming traffic. The impact fractured her vertebrae.
A nurse at the hospital told her they treat a lot of people injured near the same spot. “I thought I was going to die,” Krystofiak says. Three other people were hospitalized.
The next day, the bridge planning office in Vancouver shut for good. OMG CRC WTF? posted a picture on Facebook of the few scattered papers and dust bunnies left behind.
In Olympia, fallout from the Benton-Rivers Encounter didn’t end with the project’s defeat. The state senate convened a committee that took testimony from witnesses and collected dozens of pages of documentation. And then, acting on a complaint that Benton had filed against Rivers, the panel urged that both be counseled to use professional language.
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