PennDOT continues to review how it will replace the bridges, which are estimated to cost a total of $2.5 billion. (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation photo)
Pennsylvania could continue to work with a partnership headed by an Australian partnership to replace nine major bridges across the state and support them for 30 years. The trick is that it must find another way to pay for the construction now that adding tolls of $1 or $2 per vehicle is off the table.
The state Department of Transportation (PennDOT) continues to review how it will replace the bridges, which are estimated to cost a total of $2.5 billion. The agency considers each to be economically important structures, but the state said it does not have the funds to replace them.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that one possibility would be for the state to continue in a public-private partnership with Bridging Pennsylvania Partners, a group of contractors and investors led by Macquarie Infrastructure Developments LLC, an Australian-based firm chosen as part of the tolling proposal.
"There's just a lot up in the air right now," Alexis Campbell, a PennDOT spokesperson, told the Pittsburgh news source. "I think the path forward is still to be determined. The payment plan is the biggest issue."
The bridges that PennDOT still hopes to replace are the:
- Interstate 78 Lenhartsville Bridge Replacement Project in Berks County.
- The I-79 Bridgeville Interchange Reconfiguration in Allegheny County.
- The I-80 Canoe Creek bridges in Clarion County.
- Luzerne County's I-80 Nescopeck Creek bridges in Luzerne County.
- Jefferson County's I-80 North Fork Bridge Project.
- The bridge project at I-80 over the Lehigh River in Luzerne and Carbon counties.
- The I-81 Susquehanna Project in Susquehanna County.
- Dauphin County's I-83 South Bridge Project in Dauphin County.
- Philadelphia's I-95 Girard Point Improvement Bridge Project.
New Legislation Followed Court Ruling
Gov. Tom Wolf officially signed a bill July 11 that was approved by the General Assembly four days earlier that puts more restrictions on how public-private partnerships can be established in the state, according to the newspaper.
The administration agreed to drop the plan to toll the nine bridges and change the law after Commonwealth Court ruled in two cases filed by communities around bridges scheduled for tolling. The court decided that the state should have notified the communities and gotten comments from them before the Public-Private Transportation Partnership Board voted on the tolling idea.
The new bill specifically allows PennDOT to move forward with the Australian group so it does not lose approximately $14.8 million in preliminary work that the highway agency and the developers had carried out over the past 18 months. The Post-Gazette noted that the contract with Macquarie is a traditional public-private partnership that would have the group replace and support the bridges for three decades but did not specify where the state would get the funds.
The bill also gives the General Assembly more time to review partnership deals.
"Now that [the bill] is officially official, we'll get rolling," Campbell said in her remarks to the Post-Gazette. "These bridges are important, and we want to make sure we can get them done and have as much money available as possible to get our other work done.
"Whatever path that takes is to be determined."
A spokesperson of Macquarie told the newspaper that the company has been told to remain on stand-by while Pennsylvania officials decide what to do next. The state will owe the development group a relatively small amount of money if it walks away from the deal.
Tolls Looked Like a Viable Option — For a While
PennDOT had wanted to toll the bridges as one way to close an $8.1 billion gap between what it spends annually and what it should spend to do upkeep on one of the largest road and bridge networks in the country.
Other items under consideration are those to replace Pennsylvania's gasoline tax, where revenue is not growing very much because of more fuel-efficient gas-powered cars and trucks, and the expanded use of electric vehicles. Those include a fee for miles driven, surcharges for delivery packages and shared-vehicle rides like Uber and Lyft.
The state had planned to divide the bridges into two groups, six in the first group and three in the second. PennDOT and the contractors had been preparing documents to seek federal approval for tolling and figuring out the environmental impact of the replacement work.
The transportation agency does not yet have a timetable for how soon it will decide on how to move forward.
PennDOT had a similar public-private partnership with Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners, a group of contractors that finished replacing 558 small bridges across Pennsylvania in 2018 for $942 million. The group will maintain those bridges until 2048.
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