A bipartisan group of Oregon and Washington lawmakers who comprise a new joint committee tasked with figuring out what to do with the Interstate Bridge met for the first time Friday in Vancouver.

For many of the participants, it felt like deja vu all over again.

Lawmakers from Oregon described lingering scar tissue from the previous planning effort that ended with no project despite more than a decade of planning. And like the feelings shared at the end of the failed Columbia River Crossing project, which formally died in 2014 when Oregon shuttered its solo bridge effort one year after Washington failed to pay for its share of the multibillion-dollar project, there doesn’t appear to be much consensus on what to do just yet.

But lawmakers from both sides of the Columbia River agree that they want to do something.

Rep. Sharon Wylie, D-Vancouver, said it’s time to do something to address the congestion issues on both sides of the river. And she said it’s this generation’s time to build new infrastructure that she hopes could last for 50 or 100 years.

“We can’t spend forever to do it,” she said, “The time is now.”

But the meeting’s outset indicated the gulf that still remains over how to approach the bridge reboot and what the group is expecting to do.

In a lengthy section of the meeting to approve the committee’s organizational principles, lawmakers debated whether the mission was to designate a bridge replacement or to merely discuss that option. They eventually agreed to amend the original charter to reflect they would “discuss” replacing the bridge. Other principles include the commitment to mass transit on the bridge, through there’s no specific mention of if that would entail light-rail trains, which were the centerpiece of the failed CRC project.

Oregon and Washington transportation officials briefed the committee on the bridge’s overall condition, the traffic situation, and what portions of the years-long previous planning efforts are still viable. A packed crowd filled every seat in the council chamber and waited for more than an hour and a half of discussion and briefings before the public testimony portion of the meeting.

Travis Brouwer, the deputy director of Oregon’s transportation department who was immersed in the CRC as a public affairs official in the same agency, said the bridge is “functionally obsolete” though it is not “structurally deficient.” He said it’s a seismic risk and would likely suffer significant damage were a truck to crash into it.

“It clearly is one of the worst bottlenecks in the nation,” he said, citing its place as 29th on the list of interstate bottlenecks.

Despite that, Interstate 205’s Glenn Jackson Bridge actually draws more traffic than the I-5 one, with an estimated 165,000 daily crossings compared to I-5’s 138,000.

Brouwer said the narrow shoulders and lanes of the I-5 bridge mean it was “at capacity” in the 1990s.

The states are committed to spending $280 million on maintenance projects to repair the bridge over the next 21 years.

Elected officials from both states said they had no preconceived notions of what the new bridge would look like, and the dozens of community members who testified seemed to agree.

Speakers brought up the possibility of building two or more additional bridges, instead of one mega-bridge to replace the Interstate Bridge. Others suggested a tunnel.

Dan Kaufman, one of the few people who signed up to speak who was a Portland resident, urged the committee to listen to the public feedback.

“Don’t let us make the same mistake that we made before, and we’ll end up losing that $140 million anyway, right?” he said, a nod to the federal planning costs that the states could eventually owe if they don’t show progress toward a bridge by the end of 2024. “We’ve got to take a step back,” Kaufman said.

He reminded the committee members that the goal isn’t just to build a bridge – it was to mitigate concerns about transportation in the region. That means traffic, but also pollution and other issues.

The legislators from both states took a walking tour of the Interstate Bridge in the morning, had lunch, then gathered at Vancouver City Hall, not far from the much-maligned green dual spans over the Columbia River.

Rep. Susan McLain, D-Hillsboro, said the group would meet again Nov. 13 and Dec. 20th. A project website for the bistate committee is expected to go online next week.

If all goes according to plan, the states could restart environmental review of a proposed new project in July 2020. That lengthy process would necessitate looking at potential alternatives to the previous bridge plan – like a tunnel, or additional bridges.

The states have set an ambitious timeline of starting construction on a new bridge by 2025.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

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