The big topic of discussion at the Columbia River Crossing’s (CRC) packed Project Sponsor’s Council Meeting this morning was: um… how are we going to fund this thing?
As the project is currently burning through $1 million a month in spending, the staff is looking to the future. The plan they pitched to the bigwigs this morning is to ask the feds to earmark $200 million for Washington and $200 million for Oregon in the national reauthorized highway act, directing all that money to the CRC.
Mayor Sam Adams took the chance to point out that because the highway act has no reauthorization date in sight and is seriously stalled in Congressional debate, perchance the CRC project has time to stage a six-month independent review of their plan, as four local leaders and 14 green groups asked.
“We’ve been told that we need to get this done on our end, we will miss a deadline with any hour or minute of delay,” said Adams. “We want to get this done, but it looks like we have some weeks to do the due diligence some of us are asking for.”
Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt followed up by asking the staff, “How was it determined that $400 million was a reasonable ask from our federal delegation?”
Originally, the two state Department of Transportations talked with congressional delegations about asking the feds for $400-600 million. “I would characterize their statements as having a slight bit of heartburn with $600 million,” replied staff. “We landed on $400 million as a number everyone thinks is reasonable and likely doable.”
The largest federal transportation earmark Washington has ever received was $220 million for the Alaska Way Viaduct, Seattle’s own, more terrible version of the CRC debacle.
How they could ask for that dollar amount with a straight face for such an obviously abysmal failure of highway design is beyond me.
Poor Sam. He was probably as embarrassed as the rest of us…
F-f-f-fuck the CRC.
Sam’s got a whole hellava lot more to be embarrassed about that the CRC.