Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Recession blues: Where will funds for Bayonne Bridge fix come from?

The Bayonne Bridge crisis is fairly well known by now: the structure’s 151-foot clearance above the surface of the Kill Van Kull will be too low to accommodate the colossal container ships from Asia, expected to begin putting in at East Coast ports when an expansion of the Panama Canal is completed in 2015.

Now, while the bridge owner, the Port Authority, grapples with solutions such as jacking up the bridge another 65 feet or replacing it with a new span at a cost of $1.3 billion, new problems are arising - and time is wasting.

Paying for a solution, it seems, could be as complicated as the engineering that has to be done. In the latest curve in a long saga, recession-related declines in Port Authority revenues have curbed the bi-state agency’s ability to finance big projects on its own, raising doubts as to where the Bayonne Bridge money might come from, and when the project will be able to move forward. For example, bridge and tunnel traffic, which generates crucial toll revenues for the agency, is now anticipated to be 6.1 percent below previously projected levels for 2010.
-New Jersey Star-Ledger

For the full story: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/05/nj_ny_officials_pressure_port.html

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