Barker bridge to open soon

The Barker Road Bridge may be open for traffic on Monday. Or maybe not.

Greg Oswood, president of Morgen and Oswood Construction of Great Falls, said if weather permits some final finishing work, the bridge will be open to traffic on Monday. “It will be considered substantially complete on Monday,” he said. “We can open it up for its intended use.”

Oswood said his crews will be working all weekend, but bad weather could cause a last-minute delay. “We still have some work to complete,” he said. “We have some painting and stuff like that to be done.”

City of Spokane Valley representatives, however, are reluctant to announce that the bridge may open for fear of getting residents’ hopes up if it doesn’t work out.

“They still need to complete some items before they can open the bridge to all users,” said senior engineer Ken Knutson. “There’s a rail that goes on top of the barrier that they’re installing right now. If they finish that, they can open that sidewalk to pedestrians, but there’s still the matter of striping the bridge and the roadway. There’s equipment on the bridge. They’ll have to clean off the whole bridge deck and that whole area before it can be opened.”

The bridge project began in August 2008 with demolition of the old bridge. A temporary work bridge was built to provide a platform for people and equipment. The city received a federal grant of nearly $10 million to pay for the project. The city has since trimmed more than $108,000 from the final price tag, mostly in artwork. “We took out some of it since we were already over budget,” senior engineer Steve Worley said.

The project was changed substantially before it even began. When it became known that the Barker Road Bridge was going to be replaced, Worley said he was approached by river users. A river access point next to the bridge was listed in various guide books and they were afraid the new bridge would erase that access. “They were correct in notifying us because we had no idea,” Worley said.

Because of their input the new bridge was moved slightly. “They contacted us early enough in the project that we could move the bridge as far west as right of way allowed,” he said.

Since construction began, work has proceeded in starts and stops. Heavy snows two winters ago hampered construction and this winter the city asked for a winter shutdown. “We didn’t want the concrete deck poured at the coldest part of the year,” Worley said.

The bridge will have a sidewalk, two lanes of traffic, a center median, a parking lane on the east side and two bike lanes. The parking will replace the river user parking that was lost to a drainage swale. In the future the bridge can be restriped to have a bike lane and four lanes of traffic. “We design bridges for 50 years,” Worley said.

Residents in the area have been watching the project with impatience, sending a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls to the city asking when the project would be completed. The original contract gave the construction company 407 work days to complete the project, not counting days lost to bad weather or the winter shutdown. Those days were up at the end of May, opening the contractor up to a $3,500 fine each day.

Worley said he isn’t sure if the contractor will be asked to pay. “This is a contractual issue that we will work with the contractor on,” he said. “We don’t take these issues lightly. We also want to be fair to our contractor.”

Oswood said he expected that the discussions would end favorably. “We’ve got time extension requests in,” he said. “Quite frankly those chargeable days are going to be amended.”

It was originally thought that the contractor would have to remove the work bridge before the Barker Road Bridge could be opened to traffic. By law, the work bridge cannot be removed until after Tuesday in order to protect spawning fish. But the plans have been changed in a way that will allow the contractor to remove the work bridge without interfering with traffic, Knutsen said. Osgood said he believes his crew will have the work bridge removed by July 9.

It likely won’t be known until Monday if the bridge can open on Monday. “We’re trying to get the bridge open as soon as possible, for obvious reasons,” Worley said. “We are not going to open this bridge until we have full access for the public.”