Liberty Lake bridge to link walking trails

A long-awaited pedestrian bridge designed to be a gateway to Liberty Lake is expected to become a reality by next summer.

Doug Smith, director of planning and community development for Liberty Lake, said five bids came in with costs that fall within what the community and state can collectively pay, opening the door for construction to begin in early spring.

“The bids are a little higher than the engineers’ estimates, but significantly lower than what we’d (otherwise) been led to believe,” Smith said.

Ken Olson, of the Washington State Department of Transportation, which is working in conjunction with the city to build the bridge, said Westway Construction, of Medical Lake, appears to have the lowest bid at $1,051,000.

Reviews of the bids are being conducted and a contractor will be chosen in the next few weeks, he said.

The freestanding cement bridge will sit just west of Harvard Road, a busy four-lane overpass that spans Interstate 90.

Bicyclists and joggers have long dreaded crossing Harvard Road, because it has a narrow shoulder.

Using the bridge for pedestrian traffic allows the city to access state funds.

While construction won’t begin until early spring, with completion expected next summer, Smith is eager to get started on site preparation.

“We’re going to start moving dirt as soon as we’re able to.”

Hearing that the pedestrian bridge is stepping forward was welcome news for Liberty Lake resident Tom Specht, a volunteer on the Liberty Lake Trails Committee.

“This is something I’ve been on for about six years,” Specht said.

His group spearheaded the bridge effort in the late 1990s when it enlisted the Washington Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects to design plans for a city-wide trail system and pedestrian bridge, with design elements that would create a gateway of sorts.

A core group of 50 volunteers pushed to form a voter-approved Transportation Benefit District, a special-purpose tax district that raised $650,000 for trails and a bridge.

Their efforts nearly collapsed as estimated construction costs rose and sources of state funding hung in the balance.

“I was really concerned when the first estimates came in double in 2000,” Specht said. Those estimates placed the bridge’s costs at $1.6 million, a far cry above the $800,000 the group hoped to spend.

The city inherited the project when it incorporated three years ago, and Specht credits Mayor Steve Peterson with securing $300,000 in city funds to help the community move ahead on creating a freestanding bridge that will link north and south city residents and allow people to easily access the Centennial Trail.

Specht said the bridge is going to have functional and visual significance.

“It’s going to architecturally stand out. We’ve got a gateway to the bicyclists, a gateway to the city and a gateway to the state, too.”