LITTLE ROCK — Postponing replacement of the Broadway Bridge in favor of a new bridge at Chester Street has gained traction with local officials worried about the coming traffic nightmare when construction begins, but the idea is spinning its wheels with state highway officials.
“It’s not going to happen” is the way Scott Bennett, the director of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, bluntly put it.
The idea also elicits little sympathy from two members of the state Highway Commission from central Arkansas.
Replacing the Broadway Bridge now is a “no-brainer,” said John Burkhalter of North Little Rock.
“Is there any choice?” asked Tom Schueck of Little Rock. “I don’t think so.”
Last week, North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays raised the possibility of delaying the replacement of the Broadway Bridge and instead developing a new crossing upriver from it.
Referred to as the Chester Street Bridge, it would extend across the river from either Pike Avenue, which is also Arkansas 365, or Riverfront Drive, which also is Arkansas 100, in North Little Rock to Chester or LaHarpe Boulevard in Little Rock.
Hays was taken aback at the potential “road-users costs” that motorists will incur while the bridge is closed. The estimated $40 million in road-user costs is figured on a formula based on traffic on the three downtown bridges, the additional time motorists would need to commute, the additional mileage they will have to travel, and the increased wear and tear on their vehicles.
“It’s going to be a messy deal when you cross the bridge. It’s going to be very inconvenient for a lot of people and a lot of government officials, including the Highway Department,” Schueck said last week. “But if you’ve got something structurally deficient, you need to fix it.”
But Schueck, Burkhalter and Bennett all cited several obstacles to changing course on replacing the 90-year-old bridge:
Building a new bridge takes years of preliminary and environmental studies, and the state already is in the midst of planning to build three other bridges on new locations, they said.
In addition, the $58 million the state has for the Broadway project is money that can only be spent on bridge replacement, and if the state doesn’t spend it on the Broadway Bridge, it risks losing some of the money.
“The money that we get from the federal government has designated places it has to go,” Burkhalter said. “It’s bridge replacement money. It has to go on the Broadway Bridge. It can’t be spent to build a new bridge.
“If you want to build a new bridge you have to do preliminary studies, environmental, you’ve got to design it, you’ve got to buy the right of way - there’s a lot of work that has to go into a bridge on a new location. It takes several years to implement.”
The Chester Street bridge isn’t on the region’s long range transportation plan; in fact, another bridge has been: The crossing for the proposed Midtown Expressway. Under plans that date at least to the 1970s, the latter route would have crossed a little upriver from the proposed Chester Street bridge.
The proposed expressway would have linked Interstate 40 in North Little Rock and Interstate 630 with a beltway along Pike Avenue, crossing the river west of the Union Pacific Baring Cross bridge and curving southwest to pass west of the state Capitol. It would have extended to Roosevelt Road and, finally, to Interstate 30 near Scott Hamilton Road.
By the mid-1990s, development along its proposed route, including the headquarters for Dillard’s Department Stores on Cantrell Road, snuffed out any serious plans for the expressway.
Periodically, community leaders would revive the proposal for a similar route at other locations between Riverdale and outer downtown, including Chester Street.
Last September, some local leaders advocated adding more lanes to a new Broadway Bridge, a measure that was seen as a “cheap man’s midtown crossing,” or adding capacity without building a new bridge. The latest plans for the new Broadway Bridge now call for only one extra lane.
“A new bridge extending from Chester Street is not going to be a project,” Bennett said. “It’s not even in the long-range transportation plan. The Broadway Bridge has been in the [statewide transportation improvement plan] since 2010.”
Schueck believes the Broadway Bridge would have to be replaced before another bridge could get off the ground.
“I don’t think the finances could be worked out - I think it will be very doubtful - in time to replace the Broadway Bridge,” he said.
The Broadway Bridge is the most structurally deficient of the 33 state bridges that cross navigable waterways. It has structurally deficient ratings on all three of its components - superstructure, substructure and deck.
All three components are rated 4 on a 0-to-9 scale used in the department’s visual bridge inspection rating system, with 9 the best. Any one component rated below 5 classifies a bridge as structurally deficient.
The only other bridge over a navigable waterway in Arkansas that was considered substandard was replaced eight years ago. The U.S. 70 bridge over the White River at DeValls Bluff had structurally deficient ratings on two of its three components. It was replaced in 2004 at a cost of $17 million. The Broadway Bridge also is a U.S. 70 bridge.
A designation as structurally deficient doesn’t mean the bridge poses a danger to the automobile traffic on it or the river traffic below it. It means that inspectors have detected deterioration, cracks or other flaws in the bridge components severe enough to require monitoring or repair.
But typically it does mean such bridges undergo more inspections and incur more costs to maintain.
The Broadway Bridge is one of 12,522 state, county and city bridges the state Highway and Transportation Department is responsible for inspecting. Most bridges receive a full inspection at least once every two years.
The Broadway Bridge, because of its condition, is one of 2,130 bridges the department inspects “at a frequency greater than every two years,” said Randy Ort, a department spokesman. It undergoes a full inspection annually, he said.
“We have the money to take care of it right now,” Bennett said.
He also cited three other new bridges in development:
The Interstate 49 bridge over the Arkansas River that would connect Interstate 540 at Alma with a U.S. 71 project under construction on a new location in the area of Fort Chaffee. The environmental impact statement has been approved for the entire I-49 corridor between Texarkana and Fort Smith, but no design work has been done on the bridge.
The Great River Bridge, a $750 million proposed crossing on the Mississippi River near Arkansas City. It is part of future Interstate 69. It has been designed, but no funding for the bridge has been identified.
The Southern Gateway bridge over the Mississippi River at Memphis, a joint project between Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi. A Tennessee study has determined the project is feasible. It is now in the preliminary planning stages.
“The biggest issue is I don’t think [the Chester Street bridge] is a state highway project,” Bennett said. “This is basically a local bridge.”
If it is a local project, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola said last week not to look to his city to share in the cost anytime soon. He ruled out using any money from an estimated $65 million in sales tax revenue Little Rock is expecting to spend on capital projects.
The revenue is part of a 1 percent sales tax increase passed by voters in September that brought the city’s total sales tax to 1.5 percent. The city dedicated three-eighths of a percent to be spent on capital improvements and the remaining five-eighths to be spent on operations, including a plan to replace the city’s aging emergency communication radio system.
The department, in determining the Broadway Bridge needed to be replaced, also has cited the cost of maintaining the bridge as one factor in the decision. Over the past three years, the department has spent $258,000 in maintenance on the bridge, or about an average of about $86,000 annually, according to Ort.
That figure is almost twice what it spent on average from 2000 to 2004, which was about $44,200 a year, Ort said.
The maintenance isn’t high compared to the latest estimated cost of a new bridge, which is now at $58 million. But it is high compared to the maintenance on similar bridges. The Main Street bridge is much newer and carries half the traffic that the Broadway bridge does, but the department has spent a total of $14,000 on maintenance for it over the past three years combined, Ort said.
“It’s got to be replaced,” Schueck said of the Broadway Bridge. “The Chester Street bridge, that’s a whole new story. It’s just recently come up. I guess we can talk about it and get with the city fathers and try to figure out something.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/13/2012