Stimulus aids few Georgia bridges

By Jeremy Redmon, Ariel Hart
 and John Perry

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Downtown Atlanta’s Spring Street bridge has deteriorated so much since its debut in 1923 that at some point workers added a steel “safety support” beam underneath it — just in case.

Most of the thousands of motorists who cross the span near CNN Center and Philips Arena every day are probably oblivious to the red safety beam, crumbling concrete and exposed rebar below.

A state inspector in January gave the bridge a rating of 3 on a scale of 1 to 100, in which 100 is the best. The inspector noted the safety beam and said if it were “placed under load, there is a good chance the post could buckle.”

State officials say the bridge is safe — so long as motorists comply with its posted weight limits, though they agree it should be replaced. But don’t look for federal economic stimulus funds to come to the rescue. The bridge — which is among the busiest and most deficient in Georgia — did not get a slice of the $902 million in stimulus funds the state is using for roads and bridges. Nor did more than 2,700 other Georgia bridges inspectors have confirmed are deficient or obsolete.

Public records show the Georgia Department of Transportation is spending a small fraction — $73.4 million — of its stimulus funds on replacing 30 bridges. Most of them are not in good shape. But seven passed inspections with higher marks, indicating they are not in poor enough condition to make them automatically eligible for federal bridge-replacement funding.

Meanwhile, Georgia is spending most of its stimulus money on repaving and widening roads, easier projects that take less time to plan and complete and create jobs quickly.

Officials in Georgia and other states say their hands have been tied because the stimulus program required them to spend the money on projects that were immediately ready for construction.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has no specific requirement for bridges,” USDOT spokeswoman Nancy Singer said. “The intent of the act was clear. While improving the nation’s infrastructure, the intent of the act is to create jobs.”

Experts say it can take years to plan, design and complete bridge replacements.

“One of the requirements for using stimulus money was that the project had to be shovel-ready,” Georgia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Crystal Paulk-Buchanan said. “That means plans complete, environmental [assessment] complete and right of way purchased.”

The state is pushing stimulus money toward all bridge projects that meet those criteria, Paulk-Buchanan said. The Spring Street bridge didn’t. “A complicated project like this cannot just be ‘made shovel- ready’ in a couple of months.”

That bridge, however, has been on state project lists for years, prompting critics to ask why it wasn’t shovel-ready. Land for a rebuild was once scheduled to be bought before the 1996 Olympics, according to Atlanta Regional Commission project lists. It and other downtown bridges have been subjects of a tug-of-war between the city and the state over who should fund them, said David Haynes of the ARC, which manages the region’s project lists.

The span has also been the victim of state rules that require that roadwork money be divided equally between political districts, not prioritized by safety needs alone, Haynes said.

The city replaced a section of the Spring Street bridge before the Olympics. Responsibilities for helping replace the other sections of that bridge shifted between the city and GDOT until 2006, when GDOT took over the project.

Scarce funding has historically made it tough for Georgia to get projects ready to go, state officials said. “We are doing everything we can do with the resources we have available to us,” said Bill Kuhlke, GDOT’s board chairman.

The Spring Street span is one of the busier bridges in Atlanta, carrying an average of 17,920 vehicles per day over several downtown rail lines. The bridge is in City Councilman Kwanza Hall’s district. He said the span should be replaced immediately.

“This is one of those mission-critical bridges that need the attention that we all have been expecting,” Hall said.

State officials say they are planning to replace sections of the bridge with funds outside of the stimulus program. Construction could begin in 2012, according to GDOT. The project could cost up to $28.3 million and take 2 ½ years to complete. 

Even if they were ready to go forward with it now, GDOT officials say they would wait until after they reopen the Mitchell Street bridge in 2012 so they would not compound traffic problems in the area. Hall and others question whether GDOT could have done both bridges at the same time. State inspection reports show the Mitchell Street bridge — which is being replaced with federal stimulus funds — is in even worse shape than the Spring Street span.

Nationally, one in four bridges are either deficient like the Spring and Mitchell bridges or obsolete, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported last year in its “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” It would take $140 billion to repair all of those bridges, according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

In urging lawmakers to approve the stimulus program last year, President Barack Obama said the money could help revive the nation’s economy by saving and creating jobs. But he also said it could help shore up the nation’s infrastructure, including its “crumbling” bridges. The president made his comments nearly two years after a bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people.

In July, the Associated Press reported that tens of thousands of unsafe or decaying bridges must wait for repairs because states were spending stimulus money on spans that are already in good shape or on easier projects like repaving roads. Of the 2,476 bridges that were scheduled to receive stimulus money as of last year, nearly half had passed inspections with high marks and would normally not qualify for federal bridge money, the AP reported.

A federal Transportation Department spokeswoman said states are spending more than $3.2 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds on more than 1,260 projects involving bridges. That is in addition to the federal government’s annual spending on bridges, which totals about $4.5 billion.

States committed almost a third of federal stimulus funds — $6.6 billion — last year on new road and bridge projects rather than on repairing or preserving existing infrastructure, the U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) Education Fund said in a report last month.

Other states have grappled with the tight restrictions on how the stimulus money could be spent. Virginia, for example, is spending about $101.6 million of its stimulus funds on 119 smaller bridges and culverts and three larger spans, public records show. Most of those spans were deficient or obsolete, but Virginia still has thousands more that fit into one of those categories, said Malcolm Kerley, the chief engineer for the state’s transportation department. Kerley reviewed records of Georgia’s stimulus spending on bridges and said it appears to be in line with spending by many other states.

In Georgia, 949 bridges have been declared “structurally deficient,” a designation that means they may be cracking, deteriorating or corroding, federal records show. That classification doesn’t necessarily mean the bridges are unsafe but it does typically mean they need to be repaired or eventually replaced.

Meanwhile, many of the bridges that have been targeted with federal stimulus funds in Georgia are not structurally deficient, according to inspection records. Among them are the Island Expressway bridges that span the Wilmington River near Savannah.

As required by the stimulus program, Georgia divided $144 million of its stimulus funds for roads and bridges among the metropolitan planning organizations for its five largest regions to spend. The Coastal Region Metropolitan Planning Organization has budgeted $1 million of this money for preliminary engineering work to replace the Island Expressway bridges with taller ones that would not have to be raised for boat traffic. The existing spans are obsolete, they sometimes get stuck after they go up and down, and they require constant maintenance, according to the MPO and GDOT.

Without federal stimulus dollars to do the work, some Atlanta-area governments are moving forward with their own money or scrambling for other funding sources. They say their bridges are safe, yet they still plan to replace them.

For example, GDOT reported in 2008 that the West Lake Avenue bridge that spans the MARTA rail line just north of I-20 in west Atlanta is structurally deficient. Another inspection in February cited cracks and “section loss.” That report said “immediate measures should be taken to prevent failure and the closure of the bridge.”

A city Public Works Department spokeswoman said the bridge — built in 1940 — will be painted but the city doesn’t have money for repairs.

Observers say Georgia’s long list of other deficient and obsolete spans is troubling.

“We need to get them repaired,” said Jennifer Ball, vice president for planning at Central Atlanta Progress, a downtown self-taxing business district. “You would think we could find the resources to do it ... And not just here in downtown, but statewide.”

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With funding

Some Atlanta-area bridge projects that are getting federal stimulus funding:

Replacing the Howell Bridge Road span over Sharp Mountain Creek in Cherokee County, two miles southwest of Ball Ground. Officials say the span is narrow and structurally deficient.

Replacing the Big Creek bridge on Kimball Bridge Road, two miles southeast of Alpharetta. The new bridge will be higher, wider and shifted to the south to accommodate the widening of that corridor.

And without

Some bridge projects that are not getting federal stimulus funding:

The Mercer University Drive bridge, which spans North Fork Peachtree Creek in DeKalb County, is structurally deficient and has some section loss, cracking, holes, tears and failed deck joints, according to a state inspection report from January of last year. The county has made some repairs to the bridge since that inspection report, making it safe for school buses and fire trucks to cross, said John Gurbal , the county’s deputy director of roads and drainage engineering.

The Riverside Road bridge near Azalea Drive in Roswell was cited during an inspection in February 2009 as being structurally deficient and suffering from cracking, leaking and exposed rebar. Officials have inspected it since then and have determined it is “structurally solid,” said Steve Acenbrak , Roswell’s transportation director.

Sources: Georgia Department of Transportation, DeKalb County, the city of Roswell

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How we got the story

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained records of the condition of Georgia’s bridges from the online federal National Bridge Inventory. The newspaper sorted those records, located deficient and obsolete bridges and obtained their inspection reports from the Georgia Department of Transportation. AJC reporters and a photographer visited some of these deficient bridges and interviewed officials from several counties and cities, GDOT, Virginia, the federal Department of Transportation and the Atlanta Regional Commission. The AJC also reviewed records from the ARC, the U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) Education Fund, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.