HOW SHE SEES IT Need a bridge to nowhere? Just ask Congress

By BRONWYN LANCE CHESTER
VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Forget building a bridge to the 21st century. Congress wants to build one to nowhere. Literally. Meanwhile, we poor bridge-crossing sods would be happy if they'd just repair the ones to the 20th century.
Tucked neatly into a corner of the House's mammoth, six-year, $284 billion (yes, that's with a "b") highway bill, passed earlier this spring, is $223 million for a dandy project known as the Gravina Island Bridge. This engineering marvel is slated to be a mile long, merely 20 feet shorter than the Golden Gate Bridge and a whopping 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. Final price tag? $315 million.
You'd think only a metropolis with curse-inducing, drown-my-puppy-for-a-quicker-commute congestion could snag that kind of money in times of colossal deficits and scarce revenues.
Alas, you'd be wrong.
The Gravina Island Bridge will link Ketchikan, Alaska -- population 8,000 -- to its namesake, population 50. Presently, a seven-minute ferry ride connects the island, which houses the local airport, to the town every 10 minutes.
Heck, for the price of $6.3 million per resident, taxpayers could buy a squadron of helicopters for every soul on Gravina Island. At least they'd be earthquake proof.
Another pork-oozing project is the proposed 2.5 mile-long Knik Arm Bridge, also in Alaska, which will connect the city of Anchorage with, well, a mosquito breeding ground.
The House has already budgeted $200 million for this "bridge to nowhere." But its final price tag is expected to be $2.3 billion. Traffic engineers can't justify it, but greedy congressmen sure can.
Pork paradise
I was alerted to this pork paradise by an e-mail from the Sierra Club, an organization with which I rarely see eye to eye. So I called them up to see what gives.
Eric Olson, a Sierra Club transportation guru worried about sprawl, told me, "There is no justifiable, legitimate transportation need for those bridges. Meanwhile, we have roads and bridges falling apart in high-traffic areas."
Do we ever.
Existing bridges in our national infrastructure are literally falling apart. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 26 percent of Virginia's bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. North Carolina is in even worse shape. The state saw its vehicle traffic increase by 50 percent from 1990 to 2003, but 30 percent of its bridges are crumbling.
But the race to the bottom for rickety spans is between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where 54 percent of all bridges are decrepit. Many of these aren't exactly footpaths over babbling brooks. Lots of them serve a primary ways in, out or around entire regions.
Bridge repair
The bill does contain some earmarks for repair to the nation's 590,750 bridges. But it's also chock-a-block with constituent-pleasing bacon, such as $750,000 for horse-riding trails in Virginia's Jefferson National Forest; $1,800,000 to revitalize a staircase in the Bronx; and $150,000 for a "historic bicycle path" in Pascagoula, Miss.
The individual amounts of many such projects are so small that they amount to little more than budget dust. But that dust on 4,100 such earmarks adds up. To $12.4 billion, to be exact.
This bill, to be reconciled with its Senate counterpart, is so stuffed with pork that even President Bush, poster child for big government spending, has threatened to veto it.
If so, that would be a first.
Instead of erecting trestles to nowhere, this wastrel Congress should concentrate on fixing what we have. Else we won't be able to cross our bridges when we come to them.
X Bronwyn Lance Chester is a columnist for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.