The Pacific Northwest’s Biggest Highway Project Could be Cooked

A massive new price tag could put the Interstate Bridge Replacement back on hold for the second time in two decades.

Just three short years ago, the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) looked inevitable. After decades of false starts, Washington and Oregon were finally on track to start construction on a new, wider I-5 between Vancouver and Portland, expanding the highway and adding a slew of interchanges while replacing the twin drawbridges that span the Columbia River. The Washington legislature had just set aside $1 billion from a new transportation package specifically for the IBR, and the Oregon legislature would soon match that amount.

The project was headed toward federal approval, and the advocacy groups that had been pushing for state leaders to consider a “right sized” alternative were making little headway.

But now the IBR could be unraveling.

In the immediate wake of the departure of Greg Johnson, the IBR’s longtime program administrator, new reporting by the Oregon Journalism Project has revealed that the megaproject will be much more expensive than either state can likely afford, with a $5 to $7.5 billion cost estimate in 2022 now climbing to anywhere between $12.2 and $17.7 billion. Despite the significant pressures facing the transportation budgets in both Washington and Oregon, these new cost estimates were kept from the lawmakers tasked with overseeing the project. The IBR’s project team spent years signalling that costs would likely go up significantly without revealing the extent of the damage.

Including planned tolls on I-5 — expected to generate up to $1.6 billion — both states have only been able to assemble just under $6 billion for the project to date, with another $1.1 billion in federal transit funding eyed for the bridge’s light rail component, a three-station extension from Expo Center and Downtown Vancouver. That means the funding gap has likely expanded to $5 billion at a bare minimum, a figure that assumes the Trump Administration plans to hand over funding for one of the most contentious elements of the project: a transit line that a former Congressional candidate turned Trump staffer has called an “antifa superhighway.”

Even worse, the funding gap could end up astronomically higher, pending the resolution of a major outstanding design question. For years, the IBR team has been working with the U.S. Coast Guard in the hopes of receiving a permit to move forward with a fixed-span bridge, which would permanently restrict certain types of maritime traffic from navigating upriver. In November, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson touted “a clear path forward” on a fixed-span bridge after agreements were signed with four river users who would be impacted by a fixed-span bridge, but a final decision has not yet been made.

In the event the coast guard requires a movable-span bridge that lifts for maritime traffic, the funding gap would grow to a staggering $13 billion and add another two years to the project timeline, with work not wrapping up until 2035.

On top of all that, the $2.1 billion in federal funding already committed to the project during the Biden Administration could be in jeopardy if construction on the IBR doesn’t start by the end of 2026, an outcome that looks increasingly unlikely.

While Oregon’s transportation budget is in a much more dire situation than Washington’s, neither state is in a position to cover significant cost overruns on the project. Last week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek officially endorsed a full repeal of a stopgap transportation funding package that was passed during an emergency session last year, after a referendum on the package qualified for this November’s ballot. Without that funding, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) could be placed in an “emergency setting,” in the words of one state lawmaker.

In Washington, legislators have spent the past few years dealing with cost increases on other highway megaprojects, including Spokane’s new north-south freeway and a pair of twin highway extensions between Seattle and Tacoma. Those overruns were dealt with last spring via a 6-cent gas tax increase and a slew of other transportation related taxes and fees, but more could be on the way, even as a Ferguson proposal asks lawmakers to leverage those new revenue sources into additional state bonds to stretch transportation dollars even further.

Without this new cost estimate, only being aired now thanks to a public records request filed by Joe Cortright, a Portland economist and Director of the thinktank City Observatory, legislators would likely have been kept in the dark for another entire legislative session, planning budgets with wholly outdated information. Construction on the IBR was originally set to start by late last year, but the project is still waiting for federal approval under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to move forward.

“Frankly, it is shocking to realize that they lied, on the record, not only to me, but to the committee and, by extension, the public at large,” Oregon Representative Thuy Tran, a member of the bi-state committee overseeing the IBR, told the Oregon Journalism Project.

The IBR team, now led on an interim basis by former WSDOT southwest regional administrator Carly Francis, has defended keeping its internal numbers close to the vest, citing the fact that the cost estimates released — while clearly detailed and rigorous — are not final.

“The document you received is a draft basis of estimate, not a completed cost estimate validation process (CEVP). CEVP is a time-intensive process that involves several iterations,” Francis told the Oregon Journalism Project. “The cost estimate is not complete, and this work is ongoing. The program is working through validation of risks and associated costs. We do not yet have a new cost estimate.”

The collapse of the IBR now would mirror events from 13 years ago, when the project’s previous iteration, the Columbia River Crossing, had its project office closed down. Then just as much as now, the politics surrounding a compromise-focused design that included a light rail component on top of additional highway capacity have been fraught, with many Clark County residents unhappy that the proposed bridge wouldn’t do enough to address traffic congestion at the same time that many Portlanders see the project as bloated and an environmental disaster.

While there are some differences between the two projects, the IBR and the CRC remain very similar at their cores, which likely says a lot about how Washington and Oregon have ended up back in this spot.

“I would hope we can declare this dead,” Cortright told Bike Portland in the wake of the release of the new estimates. “This is a failure. It’s not working, and it’s because they’ve had this bloated process that’s tried to deliver this massive, super-sized everything bagel basically for highway engineers and a little bit for transit. And if we were just talking about a bridge replacement, a like-for-like replacement of the interstate bridge, be very different. I also think they’ve given the immersed tube tunnel very short shrift. I mean, the complexity of this bridge, they have to dig 250-foot deep shafts in the river in order to isolate it from seismic issues.”

Could Washington and Oregon return to the drawing board to focus on just a bridge replacement? In an interview with The Urbanist, Rep. Jake Fey, chair of the Washington House transportation committee and another member of the bi-state oversight committee, downplayed the idea of the IBR hiding anything from lawmakers while suggesting that a narrower scope might be the only path forward.

“We’ll see what the number is,” Fey said. “I believe there’s enough money to construct the bridge, tear down the old one and link it where the bridge lands. The project is bigger than that — it has interchanges north and south of the bridge. You might not be able to do all that right now, and a lot of this depends upon the very critical decision on whether the bridge is a lift bridge or not. Is that battle won? I’ve been told it could blow a hole of about a billion dollars.”

But significantly adjusting the project’s scope could require major re-evaluation of the IBR’s environmental documentation, which has all of the individual elements of the IBR tied together to achieve the project’s specific purpose and need. All along, the project team has been relying on recycling the approvals that the CRC received over a decade ago, a fact that led them to set aside the idea of updating that purpose and need to address climate change or equity during the IBR’s development.

But despite high-capacity transit — light rail — being a core project component tied into the NEPA process, Fey brought up the idea of phasing in a rail component at a later date.

“It may be that you have to make it light rail ready, as opposed to actually building it. But I think that’s largely going to evolve out of the process and the determination that [the Federal Transit Administration] does,” Fey said.

But throwing light rail overboard — a move that would be seen by skeptics as a full mask-off moment for the IBR — is likely not even enough to get the project down to an affordable level. While there may ultimately be some path forward, the chances that it looks like the IBR as it stands today appear to be exceedingly unlikely.

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