Panther Island costs keep rising: $20 million more OK’d for Fort Worth bridges
A North Texas transportation authority agreed to boost Fort Worth’s Panther Island bridges, already behind schedule, with an additional $20 million.
The North Central Texas Council of Governments’ Regional Transportation Council approved the extra money in the form a $15 million federal transportation grant and another $5 million that will be paid back to the council of governments through a special tax district. The Regional Transportation Council is a group of 44 elected or appointed officials from across the Metroplex and representatives from each of the area’s transportation providers. The body allocations how federal and state transportation dollars are spent across Dallas-Fort Worth.
Originally budgeted at $69.9 million, the new cost is a little more than $89 million.
The $20 million increase will cover money the Texas Department of Transportation has already paid to contractor Texas Sterling. Construction, according to officials, has been hampered by a complicated v-shaped pier design and slow communication between the builder and engineer. Each of the 20 v-piers is different and must be constructed separately.
Michael Morris, director of transportation for the council of governments, has said regional transportation officials were skeptical of the unique design from the beginning and urged the Army Corps of Engineers to use the same design as the West Seventh Street bridge or keep the v-piers identical. Both requests were denied. Morris said he has expected the cost of the bridges to go up from the beginning of the project roughly 10 years ago.
“We just let folks know I think you’ll have complications on the construction of it,” Morris said. “We anticipated that this day would occur and it has.”
Fort Worth Councilman Jungus Jordan, a longtime Regional Transportation Council member, said he also “felt secure” the bridges would cost more than originally proposed. The transportation council unanimously approved the funding, which will come from a federal grant already allocated to the western half of the Metroplex.
TxDOT reached a agreement with Texas Sterling late last year and paid the contractor about $15 million to continue work, Loyl Bussell, district engineer for TxDOT, said last month during a briefing to the Fort Worth City Council. The new agreement should make it easier for the contractor to complete the bridges. Work is ongoing seven days a week in multiple shifts, he said. The agreement also allows the contractor to work through issues with bridges’ design faster, he said.
Once scheduled to open in 2017, the bridges were delayed by design issues and the completion date was pushed back two years. Then project officials last year said the bridge would be finished by late summer 2020, with bridges for North Main and Henderson streets following in the spring of 2021. The White Settlement Road bridge is now expected to be done by the end of this year, with the other two finished by the end of 2021.
The $1.17 billion project requires the Army Corps of Engineers to dig a bypass channel in the Trinity River north of downtown Fort Worth. The channel should prevent a river flood, but it would also create a 800-acre island requiring three new bridges. The federal government has been slow to fund the project.
With North Texas seeing increased urban flooding from rain storms that dump more water and move slower, Morris said he remains confident in the project.
“If we weren’t doing something like this project, we would be advancing something like this project,” he said.
