Officials seek federal grant to overhaul bridge connecting York and Lancaster counties

• By Tom Lisi/LNP | LancasterOnline

Lancaster County commissioners hope a federal grant program for bridge projects can provide upward of $100 million in funds for the reconstruction of the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge.

The three-member board of commissioners unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday supporting the county’s grant application to the Federal Highway Administration’s Bridge Investment Program. It states that the bridge, which carries Route 462 over the Susquehanna River between Columbia and Wrightsville, in York County, is a critical asset in urgent need of reconstruction.

“We can’t delay action on this bridge; it needs to be done,” Commissioner Ray D’Agostino said at a Tuesday work session.

The resolution acts as a letter of support for the grant application and will be included in the county’s submission, D’Agostino said.

The grant program for bridge projects was created out of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. An upcoming Aug. 1 deadline is the last chance to apply to the program.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation did not submit the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge project for grant consideration last year because PennDOT applied for and won a $500 million grant toward a $1.3 billion project to replace the I-83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Lancaster County Planning Director Will Clark said at a June 30 transportation planning meeting.

With the hope of making the project more attractive to federal officials, the committee that oversees the use of federal and state transportation dollars in Lancaster County, called a metropolitan planning organization, is leading the charge as the principal grant applicant. PennDOT is a co-applicant and would handle the grant dollars if the project is awarded, officials said.

The county’s metropolitan planning organization manages multiyear transportation plans — a priority list for future road, bridge and other transportation-oriented projects that are eligible to be funded by federal and state transportation dollars.

All of Pennsylvania is divided into metropolitan or rural planning organizations, sometimes representing a single county or a set of them.

The cost of the Columbia-Wrightsville project alone amounts to about three years’ worth of the county committee’s funding, D’Agostino said at Wednesday’s commissioners meeting.

“Having the ability to receive some potentially federal funds would go a long way to provide some flexibility in our funding for other projects here in Lancaster County,” D’Agostino said.

Dave Thompson, a PennDOT spokesman, said the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge falls under the Lancaster County metro committee because the county’s boundary extends to the western shores of the Susquehanna River.

Lancaster County officials have received a letter of support for the grant application from York County “given the project’s importance to both counties,” Michael Fitzpatrick, spokesman for the Lancaster County commissioners, wrote in an email Wednesday.

Project changes

State transportation officials originally planned to replace the road deck for $79 million in 2023, but a subsequent routine inspection found deterioration in the bridge’s load-bearing beams. As a result, the bridge requires a major rebuild, which will involve dismantling and replacing the entire span above its arches at an estimated cost of $225 million.

Construction is slated to begin in 2027 and would close the bridge to traffic for three years, according to PennDOT.

Last year, PennDOT made temporary repairs to the bridge’s support structure, at a cost of $911,000, so it could continue to accommodate individual vehicles weighing up to 10 tons. Heavier vehicles, including many tractor trailers, have not been able to use the bridge.

If the county does not win the federal bridge grant, the project will still go forward, according to Fitzpatrick.

That means other priority projects reliant on the same federal and state transportation dollars could be delayed.

To try to relieve the bottleneck in the event the county’s municipal planning organization needs to fund the bridge rehab, the committee and PennDOT would seek out additional funding for transportation projects to keep the line on transportation projects moving, Fitzpatrick said in an email.

The Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge, also known as Veterans Memorial Bridge, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. At the time of its opening in 1930, the bridge was the longest multiple-arch concrete bridge in the world, according to the 1988 application for recognition by the U.S. National Park Service’s national register.