[All Gorge] 🔨 Putting the Old Bridge to the Pile-driving Test - HRWSBA August '26

The Hood River-White Salmon Bridge Authority got its first real look at how the federal government scores its billion dollar grant application, and the news was mixed. Reviewers cut the project's benefit score nearly in half over a single assumption about earthquakes. Meanwhile a price fight over eighteen test piles sent the board behind closed doors, and one unpaid invoice has been sitting at Federal Highways for four hundred forty-eight days.

In This Episode

• Why "Recommended" is good news and also an argument
• The one assumption that cost the project half its benefit score
• What a forty-four mile detour has to do with a grant application
• Eighteen test piles, one closed session, and a contractor standoff
• The project is under budget and behind schedule at the same time
• A fight over what color the new bridge should be
• What Kiewit learned at Oregon City that changes the plan here

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at skamaniadispatch.com
• Bridge Authority agendas, packets and meeting recordings: hrwsba.gov and hoodriverbridge.org
• Next board meeting: Monday, September 14, 2 to 4 p.m., White Salmon and Zoom. Public comment is taken at every regular meeting.
• Federal Highway Administration, Bridge Investment Program: fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/bip
• Government Accountability Office review of the grant program: files.gao.gov, report GAO-25-107227

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friends, welcome back to Open Gorge Podcast. Today we're spending the whole episode on just one agency, doing our August roundup for the Hood River White Salmon Bridge Authority. There are three meetings in August, and honestly, the most interesting month this board has had all year, in my opinion. As we've covered previously, the new bridge will now cost $1.12 billion. And a big chunk of that is supposed to come from a federal program called the Bridge Investment Program. The authority applied in July of last year, and then it's been waiting this whole year. And I've been hearing across the internet that unfortunately we're not alone. There's quite a lot of bridges that are being held up under the same process. So on August 5th, an answer came. The application is rated recommended, a passing grade, and it moves to the next round. Genuinely good news. I've been waiting with bated breath. But it's not the top grade. And you know, over here at Open Gorge, we are a big fan of being straight A students, so I can imagine only how it feels for the Bridge Authority to not get that straight A themselves. So let's see where that difference is. It started a little bit of an argument where Commissioner Mike Fox said that the notice basically derated them. Co-chair Grant Pulson disagreed, and project director Michael Shannon backed him up. Every round gets brand new reviewers, he said. They never see your old applications, so we have a chance to try again. So the board asked for a debrief and on August 21st they got one. This is the part that matters because for the first time this project gets to see its own report card. What an exciting day. It's scored in three categories. The authority did well in two and came out middling in third. That third one is actually the benefit cost analysis. So what's that? You add up everything good the project does, put a dollar figure on it, and divide by what it costs. Anything by over 1.0 means the math says it pays for itself. The authority's own math came out at 1.9. Shannon told the board the federal reviewers changed some assumptions and it came out about 1.2. That's a big drop, and most of it came down to earthquakes. I know that's something we actually take for granted around here is that we are indeed in a seismic zone. The authority assume that the longer we go without a big one, the more likely one becomes each year. The federal model holds the odds flat every year the same, which I think is a little bit more how seismologists I know would count it. But that single assumption did most of the damage. So how does the authority fix it? Not by arguing, but by changing a number it was too cautious about the first time. And that number is about you. The old application assumed that 36% of the traffic on bridge was local, but the authority has its own total records. And when you look at the zip codes attached to the breeze by accounts, local traffic is over 70%. And I feel like that matches up with what our experience is. Some of us cross the bridge not only once, twice, but sometimes many times a day, especially local businesses. And here's why that matters. The main thing this bridge does in the eyes of the federal spreadsheet is save you a 44 mile detour to the Dalles or Bridge of the Gods. And people who eat that detour are the people who live here. We all remember how it was when the bridge had that accident with the bucket excavator that took it out for two weeks. That was certainly folks' experience, and I think it's really important to put that at the center. So the more local the traffic, the bigger the benefit, and the model turns out to be really sensitive to that number, which might actually seem like a good thing in this case. The authority filed its revised application on September 4th. A decision isn't expected until late this year, and Shannon put it plainly. He said, quote, I'm now officially moving my end of September to end of December, unquote. Alright, let's talk about the other story because this one got tense. Safety first, y'all. Before this project drives a single permanent foundation, it has to answer one question. Does building the new bridge damage the old one? I'm also deeply curious about this as well. The construction plan calls for a temporary work platform standing on about 700 driven piles, some within 50 feet of the bridge that opened in 1924, well over a hundred years ago. So the plan is we're gonna drive 18 piles first, watch the old bridge through sensors, then pull all those piles back out. On August 18th, staff sat down with Kewit, the project's contractor, to price that work with an independent estimate to compare it against, and it really didn't go well. Shannon would only say that there's a significant difference between the two numbers, wouldn't say much more, because negotiations are still ongoing. So on August 24th, the board got an odd request. Approve a backup plan, get ready to put this work out for competitive bid, even though your own contractor is under contract to be considered for it, and to do it without being told the number. Commissioner Catherine Thomas pushed back, but her point was very practical. It's late August. Marine contractors are booked through the end of the year. And as she put it, the ones we want don't have holes. But underneath was a number nobody wants to discover the hard way. If driving those piles does hurt the old 1924 bridge with their vibrations, strengthening enough to survive construction could run another few hundreds of millions of dollars. The realistic alternative I'm gonna hold your hands when I say this. The realistic alternative to damaging the old bridge during construction of the new bridge is to close it for the whole construction period, which could be several years. So think about the life you live now and how much you depend on that bridge, and the detour to either the Dows or to Cascade Locks and what that would look like for many years of your life. So they need to know now, as would I think all of us. Here's the procedural twist. The board wanted more than it could legally hear that day because its own agenda said there'd be no closed session. So they voted to come back on August 27th, and that meeting ran about an hour, mostly behind closed doors. It came out at 5 36 and passed three motions in four minutes, appoint an oversight committee, get a competitive bidge package ready, and line up the steel pipe. Each motion carried the same limit, said out loud every time. The committee only advises, so every real decision is gonna come back to the full board. So two things to know. This is the plan B that we're talking about. And plan A is still the deal with original contractor QIT. No public record yet that I can find says how that follow-up negotiation went. The price isn't public just yet, and neither in the names of three committee members, so we're gonna wait on some of those minutes to come out. But in the meantime, here's a quick tour of the rest of it. On money, the project is actually doing well, and that is a testament to all of the staff that have just been hammering on that, I think, for many, many months, many, many years by this point. The work done so far was worth $35.6 million and cost $26.8 million. Staff think Kiwit will finish actually $15 to $16 million under the contract, and that underrun is the money that would pay for the test pile. So the budget and the procurement fight are the same story. The schedule, though, has slipped by another three months. So I know I hear a lot about people talking about tolls. Whenever this comes up online, people are like, oh my gosh, why don't our tolls go towards this? Didn't the tolls that we've collected for the last many years contribute to this somewhere? I think it's a commonly misunderstood piece of this. And so I'm always really happy to hear tolls discussed in these meetings. So here's where we're at with that. Tolls brought in roughly $712,000 in July, with traffic about 7.5% below last July. Finance Director Debbie Smith Wayar blames gas prices. I'm gonna say that number again because I think it gives you a sense of even in a low year, what monthly during our peak season of something like summer, how many tolls come in? Again, that's gonna be $712,000. And I now want you to calculate that backwards to the $1.12 billion. A billion dollars is a lot more than you think it is. I think it's always important for us to look at the math. I know we're big fans of it over here at Open Gorge, and that even at modern peak pricing, tolls are simply just not going to cover the entire cost. The bridge, the arithmetic is, you know, kind of outweighs even any management questions, in my opinion. I think it's really important to know then why the work of this team to get that federal money has been so, so critical. There's now this invoice. There's an older federal grant that has one final reimbursement standing. $404,000 sitting at the federal highways for 448 days. The authority had already paid it and we're looking for that reimbursement back for all of that money that we've already paid out. Fox called it a great big delay tactic. His worry isn't about the invoice, it's what happens later. He said, quote, we got to get this thing fixed because it will absolutely kill us in construction. 400 is one thing, but when you're spending 20 million a month, unquote, it's really going to be quite an issue. So you can imagine that kind of delay that's already dealing with $400,000 plus. Imagine now that we're spending $20 million a month and the authority and everyone has to lay out $20 million a month and then suddenly wait 400 plus days to get paid back. That's going to be real rough. So I'm hoping they sort that out. Moving to the permit side, Hood River County's comet period closed September 1st, and the first real objection came from Friends of the Columbia Gorge, which is a nonprofit organization based out of Portland that often is concerned with enforcing something called the National Scenic Act. So their concern is about how the bridge looks. Commissioner Arthur Babbitt's called the response both, quote, late and disturbing, unquote, saying it seemed to reopen issues that had long been closed. The objections are they believe that scenic area rules imply a steel truss design, and that the concrete and steel are the wrong color. The authorities' answer will be short engineering statements. A bridge this long can't be made earthquake resilient as a truss. And as we just heard in this episode, that seismic concern was something that the federal government thought should be rated quite highly, and I think anybody who lives here would also agree. And concrete can of course be tinted to certain colors, but not consistently across a thousand batches, which is not something that I knew. One note the public should have because Her River County is reviewing this application, Babbitz has recused himself from the land use side in his county role. Finally, good news. The geotechnical drilling is finished, and the last hole found rock about where the survey predicted. I know this was an issue earlier in survey, so glad to see that catching up. Kewitt showed the engineering committee the work on the Abernathy Bridge at Oregon City. That's a good lesson. Temporary steel casings let cruise pour concrete year round outside that narrow inwater window. And here's a sobering one. At Oregon City they poured off a bridge deck overhead, and here there's nothing overhead. So concrete trucks will ride barges for 14 and 15 hour continuous pours. I know we've seen some of that exciting work and how it takes place over at the railbridge replacement at the mouth of the White Salmon River. You can drive by if you like and take a look at what that looks like, those barges and cranes. It's kind of a fascinating process. One commissioner offered the footnote of the month. In 1924, they built the Current Bridge with a wooden gang plank and a wheelbarrow. I think that is not going to work today, but it's kind of fascinating to see how little technology was used to build the current bridge we all drive on. So what's next? The board meets Monday, September 14th, 2 to 4 p.m. in White Salmon and on Zoom. Watch that one for word on the Kiwit negotiation, and the test piles have to go in between January and March. The only window regulators will allow work in the river. You can read the whole thing with every number and link at schemania dispatch.com. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, home of the Scamania Dispatch and the Click of Taddler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to Schemania Dispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.comslash opengorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.