FEDS: KEEP ON WALKING: U.S. Department of Transportation denies Big Four Bridge grant request

Clark County

Discussion

February 19, 2010

By DAVID A. MANN The News and Tribune Fri Feb 19, 2010, 08:21 PM EST

The U.S. Department of Transportation has denied a $25 million request for federal funding for the Big Four Bridge project.

Local leaders had asked for the money as a part of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, also known as the TIGER grant, which allocated federal stimulus dollars to transportation projects.

The Big Four Bridge was a railroad crossing between Jeffersonville and Louisville until it was abandoned in 1969 and its approaches were removed and sold for scrap iron. Leaders from Kentucky and Indiana are seeking to convert the structure into a pedestrian and bicycle crossing.

A new bridge approach is being built in Louisville and one is being designed for Jeffersonville. The money requested through the TIGER grant would have covered the $15 million price tag on the Jeffersonville approach.

Jeffersonville Planning Director Brian Fogle noted that construction plans for the approach should be completed by October. In order to have the money in place so that the project can be bid out at that time, officials will have to go back to what he referred to as “plan A,” which is to request the money from the Ohio River Bridges Project.

That project is aimed at building two new highway bridges — one between downtown Louisville and downtown Jeffersonville and another between east Louisville and Utica. The downtown highway bridge includes plans for a new pedestrian crossing.

Fogle said officials could seek to transfer federal dollars for that crossing to the Big Four project.

[The Big Four] is a better walking environment than one alongside six lanes of interstate traffic,” he said, also noting that it would cost less and could be completed faster since the base of the structure is in place.

Jeffersonville officials are considering a proposal in which two pillars are constructed on each side of the bridge that support a winding approach that descends downward from the 57-foot-high bridge deck to Mulberry Street.

Louisville’s Waterfront Development Corp. is the principal agency in charge of rehabbing the bridge, a $10 million renovation project in itself. Piers and structural steel need repaired; a concrete bridge deck needs to be constructed; and lights and handrails need installed, Kentucky officials have said.

Mike Kimmel, the corporation’s deputy director, noted that money to cover that work is included in Kentucky’s proposed budget.

“We were disappointed, but we understand that there’s a very limited amount of money and a lot of projects,” Kimmel said of the failed grant request.

UP RIVER

About $20 million in TIGER grant money was awarded for a bridge project in neighboring Jefferson County, Ind. That grant will go toward replacing the aging Milton-Madison Bridge, between Milton, Ky., and Madison, which carries vehicles.

That structure was built in 1929 to accommodate farm equipment and early automobiles. It stretches six-tenths of a mile, has two traffic lanes, each 10 feet wide, and no shoulders.