New bridge plan better than the old one

The more the state changes its approach to the Knik Arm bridge project, the more it alleviates our concerns.

Way back when this plan was still envisioned as a so-called public-private partnership, we were concerned, as a number of people were, that bridge planners seemed to think investors wouldn’t sign up unless the state guaranteed a certain amount of toll revenues.

“How is that anything but a sweetheart, no-risk deal for those private investors?” we thought. So did a lot of other people, apparently.

So now the state is looking at the Knik Arm bridge as a project it will task the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to take on. Say what you will about DOT, but they have a track record of getting some pretty large projects built in Mat-Su, from Trunk Road to Seward Meridian Parkway.

In cost and complexity, the bridge dwarfs those. But we are not concerned about the department’s abilities.

And, in this scenario, there is not a private company siphoning off toll revenues and potentially millions out of the state treasury each year to pay its costs.

One could argue that the contractor that constructs the bridge will also have a profit built into its contract. That’s true, of course. But it is not an ongoing obligation and much more easy to predict up front exactly what it will cost.

That contractor’s profit also likely won’t equal the nearly $2 million we paid each year in salaries for Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority staff to sing the praises of this project regardless of its benefits or risks.

While this new plan for the bridge is better than the old one, we remain unsatisfied in one regard — we still need a solid plan for upgrading roads on our side of the bridge to handle the traffic that this new bridge would dump onto Mat-Su roads.

KABATA was never tasked with making the bridge function with our existing transportation network. It was tasked with building a bridge and recruiting funders.

Now, planners under the auspices of DOT we can design a plan that considers both the bridge and the network of Mat-Su roads to which it links.

We hope the day is near when we will see a DOT plan for how to upgrade our roads to handle traffic from the would-be bridge besides dumping it onto the already dangerously overloaded Knik-Goose Bay Road, or the primitive Burma Road, which would lead traffic through Big Lake back to the Parks Highway.