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Lawmakers to push for $500M trust fund to help fix Pennsylvania’s decaying bridges

A crane is in place on Monday, Jan. 31, 2022, as part of clean up efforts at the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh that collapsed Friday, Jan. 28. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Two veteran Pennsylvania lawmakers from both parties say they will push for legislation to create a $500 million local bridge trust fund that could offer significant relief to the state’s aging infrastructure and help reduce a backlog of badly deteriorating spans statewide.

State Rep. Mike Carroll, D-Luzerne, minority chair of the House Transportation Committee, said he and Rep. Tim Hennessy of Pottstown, the Republican committee chairman, hope to introduce the bill by the end of the month. Then they will try to incorporate it in the state budget during negotiations in June for the 2022-23 spending package.

“The challenge for fixing local bridges is a challenge across the state,” Mr. Carroll said in Pittsburgh last week. “This will make a dent, but we really need more. We have to substantially change tax policy and infrastructure policy.”

The move comes in the wake of the collapse in January of the Fern Hollow Bridge — a span that had been deteriorating for years in poor condition — leaving 10 people injured and several vehicles crushed in the wreckage.

The idea originated with Thomas Stockhausen, former senior vice president and chief operating officer of engineering firm CDR Maguire of Pittsburgh, who died two weeks ago. The firm often works with smaller communities that struggle to care for their own bridges and aren’t eligible to enter the type of public-private partnerships the state can use for funding and project expertise.

Some details are still being worked out, but the concept would allow communities to get funding and some technical help for their decaying bridges through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The money would come from state budget surpluses or federal pandemic relief funds.

Last year, those funds reached $7.3 billion, but the Republican legislative majority only used about $1 billion, leaving the rest in the state’s “rainy day” fund.

Sen. Wayne Langerholc Jr., R-Johnstown and chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said he would review the bill when it is introduced. If the trust fund is added to the budget, it also could be part of the state fiscal code, which would mean it would be funded annually unless the Legislature removed it.

If the legislation passes, it would be just one of many solutions to help alleviate a growing disparity between the number of state bridges getting repaired and those in local jurisdictions like Pittsburgh, where some spans have languished in poor condition for years without help.

Their proposal comes after a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation last month found that over the past 10 years, the state sunk millions of dollars into renovating the bridges it owns in the city, cutting the number of spans in “poor” condition by about 90%. And by contrast, Pittsburgh has been stuck over the past decade with the same number of bridges in poor condition — 22 in all. The same disparity was true across the state, the Post-Gazette’s analysis found.

A second Post-Gazette investigation published Sunday found that a large part of that disparity is due to how the statewide funding system directs state and federal funds to bridges that are in fair or good condition, while leaving locally owned bridges in poor condition to flounder.

The disparity highlights the stark contrast between how the city and state are able to fund their critical infrastructure needs — and underscores how the state succeeded in prioritizing its own urgent bridge repairs while Pittsburgh chronically struggled to keep up.

“We’ve got a lot of structurally deficient bridges around the City of Pittsburgh that the city owns,” said City Controller Michael Lamb.

While the creation of a trust fund could help local governments, experts say it’s just one of the steps that needs to be taken to overcome some of the hurdles that have kept local officials from repairing bridges and, ultimately, protecting motorists.

The state needs to do a better job of helping boroughs, townships, cities and counties to navigate the byzantine bridge-funding system the state has in place — a system that wields enormous control, say state lawmakers and experts.

Big hurdles

To overcome that, Roberto Leon, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, believes the state has a responsibility to educate those local governments on how to get public money for its bridges.

“What the state could be doing much better is setting up workshops to train people [in local governments] on how to” obtain funding for local bridges, he said. “Because most of the people are defeated in these processes, not by their unwillingness to do the work, but by the bureaucratic process which they do not understand and basically ends up paralyzing them. This is where the states and institutions can help the smaller jurisdictions.”

If local communities can’t compete to get funding for their decaying bridges, one other solution to ensure all spans are given the same consideration is to make sure the state has some overall responsibility.

“Connecticut has done that,” Mr. Leon said. “And then you have one body responsible for all the bridges.”

In Connecticut, the state is directly responsible for inspecting every bridge over 20 feet in length, regardless of whether it’s owned by the state or a local government. In Pennsylvania, each bridge owner is responsible for inspecting its bridges.

Democratic state Sen. James Brewster of McKeesport has a slightly different idea short of having the state take over inspection of all bridges: audits for each bridge, to create greater accountability. That means every agency or government that owns or oversees spans — local, regional, and state — would sign off on every inspection and the bridge’s status.

“If you have a bridge, there would be an audit that shows that it has been inspected, what it is rated, and the strategy in place to get the funding,” he said.

PennDOT, as well as the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission — the agency that dispenses federal money in Western Pennsylvania — and the other state regional funding groups, would all have to sign off on the audit each year, to recognize that they have considered every bridge for possible repairs, Mr. Brewster said.

“If a bridge is in fair condition, you should be starting to put that bridge in the pipeline for funding,” he said. “Because it’s not going to go from fair to good without funding, it’s going to go from fair to poor.”

Such an audit would require state legislation, Mr. Brewster said, to pull in the agencies that would be responsible for carrying out such an audit — something he said he would discuss with fellow lawmakers.

“We have to do something to help local communities with their bridges,” Mr. Brewster said.

Different evaluations

For now, Mr. Leon believes that since there isn’t enough money to fix every bridge, the government should take on the worst spans before it moves onto the others.

He said he would also like to see bridges evaluated differently.

“The current bridge rating system is a relic,” he said. “And we need to get into a mode where our next inspections are much more up to date. We have the tools now to be able to do the job much better.”

For example, Mr. Leon said, instead of having inspectors take hundreds of photos of possible problem areas of a bridge and then having engineers review each photo, there are already artificial intelligence systems that can analyze photos like that and narrow them down to possibly 10 that the engineers should review.

In addition, there are monitoring systems in the works that constantly analyze bridge conditions, though dealing with all that data is a problem that is still being tackled.

“We need to make a leap in the way we do bridge inspections and how we do rehabilitation,” Mr. Leon said. “I’m talking jumping two or three generations of change. The current system is completely outdated.”

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