COMMENTARY

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The latest plans for a new lakefront drawbridge at North Coast Harbor are cause for both delight and dismay.

The delight is that the excellent design, approved unanimously Thursday and Friday in respective meetings of the city's Downtown/Flats Design Review Committee and City Planning Commission, is very much worth building.

Architect Miguel Rosales of Boston, who led the design in partnership with engineers from the Cleveland office of CDM Smith and the New York office of Schlaich Bergermann, has conceived a drawbridge consisting of a pair of elegantly slender, L-shaped jackknife spans.

Miguel Rosales at North Coast Harbor in 2009.

The bridge will link Voinovich Park at the north end of East Ninth Street to the finger pier just north of the Great Lakes Science Center. It will create an inviting pedestrian loop around the seven-acre harbor and its new marina, and could become a powerful, postcard-worthy attraction on the city's chronically underused lakefront.

For reasons based on the geometry of the harbor, Rosales designed each half of the bridge as a curve, which should make the twin structures far more satisfying to watch in motion than a pair of straight, jackknife spans.

And instead of the usual clunky counterweights used to operate such bridges, Rosales specified a pair of below-grade electrical motors to wind and unwind steel ropes to raise and lower the spans. The overall effect should harmonize nicely with surrounding buildings, especially I.M. Pei's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Such investments have paid off handsomely in other cities, and there's every reason to believe the bridge, to be named like the adjacent park for former U.S. Sen. George Voinovich, will be a draw.

The dismay is that the project has been such a long time in coming. Conceived as an outgrowth of the city's 2004 lakefront plan, the bridge won't have a groundbreaking for another year, and won't be finished until 2017, the city said Wednesday.

During the years of waiting, caused in part by state and federal review of the design, the price of construction climbed $1.8 million higher than the original estimate of $6.2 million, the city revealed on Wednesday.

This shouldn't convince anyone that the project should be scrapped. While dealing with everything from poverty to seemingly intractable problems in city schools, Cleveland must capitalize on assets such as the lakefront. Failing to do so would add to decline.

Nevertheless, the harbor bridge shows how costly and difficult it is to design and build infrastructure in the United States.

A far more painful example is the long-running saga of the Ohio Department of Transportation's project to revamp the I-90 Inner Belt, the ganglion of intersecting highways that curves around the east, south and west sides of downtown Cleveland.

In 2005, five years after planning began, ODOT estimated that the project would cost $700 million. Today, after 14 years of planning and construction of only one of the two major bridges in the project, the estimated cost stands at more than $3 billion, and the rest of construction isn't expected to be finished for two decades or more.

The pattern is common, and it has led to the staggering $24 billion spent on the Big Dig in Boston, or the $3.9 billion budgeted for the new Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River in New York.

Federal officials rejected the Miguel Rosales proposal for a single span drawbridge at North Coast Harbor that would have risen slightly into the Burke Lakefront flight path.

Cost escalation through inefficiency of project review and approval is a national problem, which makes Cleveland's small harbor bridge an example of the tendency in microcosm and a case worth studying.

It was back in 2005 that the city secured $4.5 million for the bridge through federal earmarks supported by the late U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and then-U.S. Rep. Steven LaTourette and then-Sen. Voinovich.

Two years later, the city assembled the rest of the funding, including $490,000 from the state of Ohio and $1.1 million from general obligation city bonds.

Confident that it had the cash to proceed, the city in 2007 chose a design team led by Rosales in a competitive process that emphasized the potential for a high-quality result on a highly visible piece of the downtown lakefront.

By August, 2009, the city had settled on two of six design variations prepared by Rosales. The preferred version called for a single jackknife span that would have risen 135 feet above the water, poking slightly into the flight path of Burke Lakefront Airport, just to the east of the harbor.

The second proposal, now headed for realization, called for two L-shaped spans that would rise only 71 feet when open.

As officials in Columbus and Washington, D.C., reviewed the project over the next few years, they decided eventually to reject the single span in favor of the lower, double one.

The Ohio Department of Transportation had jurisdiction because of the federal money in the project; and the Federal Aviation Administration had a say because the bridge is under the flight path of Burke.

As the clock ticked, inflation took hold.

"We did reach a point over the last several years in which the sum total of what we were proposing was greater than the budget," Ken Silliman, Mayor Frank Jackson's chief of staff, said Wednesday.

The city plugged the gap, he said, by borrowing an additional $600,000 in bonds, and by landing an additional $1.5 million from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.

But finding the extra cash also added to the delay, Silliman said.

A second 2009 proposal for the North Coast Harbor Bridge called for a double jackknife arrangement. Rosales has since slimmed the spans from 14 to 12 feet in width, reducing cost while making the design more elegant.

Rosales also made adjustments, including narrowing the two jackknife bridges from 14 to 12 feet in width. If anything, those changes have made the spans look slimmer and more appealing in its proportions.

From here forward, the city will finalize a state lease on submerged lands necessary for the project, and proceed to fabrication of the bridge. A structure to house controls for a bridge tender also needs to be finalized.

It would be wrong to conclude from this story that cities should ditch their aspirations and forget projects such as the harbor bridge.

Maintaining and redesigning the nation's aging roads, bridges, waterfronts and transit systems is not an option. It's part of the cost of establishing the market conditions for a healthy economy.

It would also be wrong to conclude that it was a mistake to attempt something unique and highly beautiful on the lakefront.

Rosales said in an interview that architects and engineers working on infrastructure projects know they'll be rewarded for producing rote solutions more likely to sail through legally mandated state and federal environmental reviews.

"Whenever you want to do something different or special or unique in the United States, it's very hard, very difficult," he said.

The answer is not to crush the creativity of designers and settle for mediocrity. The country instead needs to speed up review processes that are necessary and important, but which can also strain budgets and delay the delivery of public goods.

It's not likely to happen overnight, but one can hope. In the meantime, special projects like Cleveland's upcoming harbor bridge will require patience. To judge by the newest iteration of the Rosales design, the results will be worth the wait.