I guess Bechtel didn’t get as much Gulf War payola as they were asking for
Bechtel has sent the City of Portland an unsolicited proposal to replace the Sellwood Bridge with a new US$90 million dollar bridge, on the hopes that the city will leap at the chance to do a "public-private" financing deal (which, translated, will mean the city will give up something big in return for a few, and I emphasize few, dollars of kickback from the private underwriters. Those sorts of deals are almost always bad for the city, even though Bechtel hasn't gotten as much from their other "public-private" deal as they may have hoped for.
In this case, Bechtel is proposing to build a bridge with "more lanes" of traffic, which may not go over quite as well as they expect it to. You see, the last time the whole business of "we're going to replace your old bridge!" came up, the DOT had big plans to replace the existing bridge with a 4-lane bridge to feed into the major highway that they want Tacoma Street to be. It didn't go over too well; when they made a presentation to SMILE and claimed that (a) the bridge had to be four lanes to accomodate the traffic, and that (b) it wasn't definitely going to be Sellwood, because there was one other choice, but, gosh, it would be silly to even pursue the replacement unless both places gave permission to build the bridge, they were forced to admit that the choices for the new bridge were either (1) Tacoma Street or (2) Dunthorpe. You could feel the temperature dropping in the room when the perky DOT PR drones let the magic word "Dunthorpe" escape their lips.
Of course, as soon as SMILE let the DOT know, in no uncertain terms, that Sellwood would not tolerate a 4-lane highway bridge, the whole "we're going to replace your old bridge!" plan was dropped like a hot potato. Why? Because the Oregon DOT is in the thrall of the local trucking lobby, which made it known that they would not allow any bridge replacements in Portland unless they were 4-lane bridges.
So, fine, no 4-lane Sellwood bridge, and we'll keep the old narrow bridge with the crumbling westside approaches (you'd think that Multnomah County could just deal with the crumbling westside approaches by ripping them out and building a new approach structure, like they did with the Hawthorne Bridge, but the Hawthorne Bridge doesn't get nearly as much commuter traffic from Clackamas County (which, by an amazing coincidence, doesn't wish to build any more Willamette River crossings. Funny how that works) and thus the DOT can actually repair things without going through the "weh weh weh we want you to fuck up your city for our convenience!" (if I became emperor of the world, I'd give them convenience; I'd put toll gates on McLaughlin and Macadam, and force the DOT to fund those roads from the revenues from those toll gates) dance with the suburbs.)
And now here comes Bechtel, saying "we'll do it for you, just give us a little bit of special treatment and we'll give you a million dollars out of the US$90 million it will cost to replace the bridge" (for a bridge that Multnomah County thinks will cost US$75 million to replace.)
I hope that Metro tells Bechtel to go to hell. Actually, I hope that Metro tells Bechtel to go to hell and yanks their contract for Cascade Station, but I'll settle for having Metro tell Bechtel to go to hell. Perhaps it's time to give Metro a little "citizen input" about this proposal.
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Re: Bechtel proposal on Sellwood Bridge
i.e.Bottom-line profit cloaked as a favor to Portlanders. What this 'region' really needs is a sensible way to handle the inevitable traffic in Clackamas and Washington counties: such as a bridge at Lake Oswego. This would save several miles of travel between the Sunnyside area and Southwest Portland. I have noticed that Lake Oswego is rapidly going ahead with development that would effectively block a new bridge in their area.
Perhaps one solution would be a streetcar line over the Sellwood Bridge connecting Milwaukie to North Macadam. Our planners believe, however mistakenly, that commuter rail will ALWAYS and EVER prevent increased traffic congestion, so a streetcar line would give us the perfect rationale for keeping the Sellwood Bridge at two lanes. If they say, "It really needs to be four lanes" we can say "the streetcar will handle any increase in traffic." A street car line would also improve property values and lead to higher quality development on the main street. The Milwaukie light rail, to me, makes little sense, when we could have two streetcar lines for a fraction of the cost of the LRT.