Politics

Officials Look At New Money For St. Cloud Bridge

(AP) Unsure whether bowed gusset plates on a closed St. Cloud bridge can be repaired, Minnesota transportation officials hope to fast-track a new span the same way they're replacing the fallen Interstate 35W bridge down the Mississippi River.

A day after inspectors spotted the Highway 23 bridge defect and ordered the emergency closure, acting Department of Transportation Commissioner Bob McFarlin said engineers were meeting to consider temporary fixes that would allow traffic to resume until a replacement is built. No matter what, he said, a new bridge will be accelerated.

"The bridge needs to replaced. It needs to be replaced soon. We will find and use the resources necessary to do that," McFarlin said.

A recently approved transportation spending plan could be used to pay for the bridge.

McFarlin guessed that a new bridge would cost $25 million to $35 million; Dan Dorgan, the state's chief bridge engineer, said it would normally take up to four years to get such a project from design through construction.

Inspectors found bending in four gusset plates on the bridge near downtown St. Cloud. The bridge is the same kind as the steel-truss Minneapolis bridge that collapsed last summer, killing 13 people.

Special inspections ordered during the investigation of that collapse led to the discovery of the flawed plates on the St. Cloud bridge. Dorgan said the 5-foot-by-8-foot plates showed slight bending at their ends, a problem previous inspections didn't catch. Past reports merely document paint problems at the gussets.

Dorgan said he believes the bridge might have borne too much weight. After the I-35W collapse, federal investigators told states to recalculate the allowable weight for similar bridges. Minnesota has about two dozen state-owned bridges that got special attention and there are 36 more under municipal control.

Reviews of those bridges are under way, with a completion goal of June.
Transportation officials say it's not clear whether they can repair the St. Cloud bridge. One option might be to bolt steel plates to the existing ones.

"The best analogy I can come up with is that it's similar to one having a brace on a leg, to stiffen that," Dorgan said. "These cannot simply be pulled out and replaced. You would have to disassemble the entire bridge to remove it."

On his weekly radio show Friday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty stood behind the state Department of Transportation's decision to close the bridge.

"Even though it presents an inconvenience and a challenge, it's good that MnDOT erred on the side of caution and immediately closed the bridge," Pawlenty said.

Motorists have a six-block detour, but on a Good Friday that may have been a day off for some people, no problems were reported.

"Traffic is flowing pretty well," Mayor Dave Kleis said. "But we'll see Monday."

State and local officials had already been working to move up the original 2015 target date for replacement. Kleis said he would prefer the state go right to a replacement instead of repair.

"With the inconvenience of construction, we would rather have it all done at one time than dragging it out for several years," Kleis said.

Money for the project is available in the transportation spending plan enacted over Pawlenty's veto. It contains a dedicated, $600 million account for repairing and replacing ailing bridges. The St. Cloud bridge, on the basis of its fracture-critical status, qualifies for the pot of money.

Money for road and transit projects will come from a higher gas tax, increased registration fees on new vehicles and an extra sales tax in some Twin Cities-area counties.

"People can grumble about paying the gas tax -- I know I do -- but I'd rather have that money going to fix roads and bridges than lining some guy's pockets on Wall Street," said Democrat Steve Murphy, the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

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