Washington bridges suffer while lawmakers underfund maintenance and preservation

The Washington state Legislature is about to start work on the budgets, which is the heavy lifting this session. Lawmakers will be facing a near billion-dollar annual gap in paying for maintenance and preservation for Washington bridges.

We highlighted the lack of funding for the state’s roads earlier this session. Lawmakers have chosen to under-fund the regular maintenance and preservation over the last few decades. It’s about a billion dollars a year.

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The state spends $4 on new projects for every $1 it spends on taking care of what we already have.

Here’s the reality for the state’s bridges: The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is responsible for more than 3,400 bridges. In a recent briefing to the Washington State Transportation Commission (WSTC), Evan Grimm, an engineer within the WSDOT bridge office, highlighted their condition.

“8.5% are in poor condition,” he told the commission. “55.4% are fair and 36.1% are good.”

And the bridges are only getting older and in worse shape every year.

“The average bridge is 51 years and the oldest bridge was built in 1915,” Grimm told commissioners. “Replacing all 313 bridges that are 80 years old and older would cost us about $8.3 billion.”

Grimm used the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as an example. The westbound bridge is 75 years old.

A series of expansion joint failures last year forced the closure of several lanes for extended periods of time. These were emergency repairs that should have been taken care of with regular maintenance.

“The deck and expansion joints, they really needed to be rehabilitated years ago, and what we’re seeing here, the impacts are a result of not doing that preservation work in a timely manner,” Grimm said. “The cost implications are going to just continue to rise on the structure, especially if we don’t rehabilitate the deck soon.”

And just a reminder as lawmakers start their budget work, they only fund about 40% of the yearly need for maintenance and preservation. They need to find another $5 billion to pay for the ongoing fish passage work. They need to find more than $5 billion for the ferry system.

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Preservation alone is $3 billion in the next decade. And all of this is just to break even on what is needed today.  Lawmakers also have to find an extra $ 700 million to finish State Route 520 over Portage Bay.

Time for a priority change, but that’s been the case for several decades.

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