WASHINGTON — The Interstate Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) has secured its first big tranche of federal funding, marking a major milestone for the effort to replace the aging twin bridges that carry Interstate 5 over the Columbia River.
According to a joint statement from members of Washington's congressional delegation, the U.S. Department of Transportation released its list of Mega grant program recipients for 2023 on Friday, and the IBR project made the cut with an award of $600 million. The IBR team previously told KGW that it requested $600 million when it applied to the Mega program, so the award announcement is everything they'd hoped to receive.
Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, joined by U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, said that the IBR project received the largest of 11 awards for projects across the country.
"This Mega program award will be a major step forward toward strengthening the safety and efficiency of this vital interstate artery," Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement. "I’ll continue working to bring every possible federal dollar home for this project so our local drivers, especially our commuters, and economy can feel the benefits.”
The Mega program was created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure package, which tasks the Department of Transportation with distributing $1 billion each year to large highway, bridge, rail or public transit projects for fiscal years 2022 through 2026. The IBR program applied to the first round and was not selected, but the team reapplied this year.
IBR's $600 million award is among the largest given out by the Mega program so far; the biggest awards in 2022 were $292 million for Amtrak (split over four years) and $250 million for the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River, which the IBR team has often cited as an example of a project that has a similar scope and is chasing the same federal funding sources.
The Mega grant is only the first of three competitive federal funding sources that the IBR team will need to secure in order to fulfill its financing plan for the $6 billion megaproject, but the award does mark the first time the federal government has committed serious money to the current replacement effort.
Washington and Oregon lawmakers have been making a full-court press for the Interstate Bridge during the lead-up to the grant announcement; Washington's entire congressional delegation signed a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in August in support of the IBR program's Mega application, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee stressed the importance of the project during a visit the existing bridge last month.
Financing plan
The IBR project plan calls for not only replacing the twin I-5 bridges but also replacing the bridge that carries the freeway to Hayden Island from the Oregon mainland, building a new local bridge to the island, extending MAX light rail across the river and rebuilding or upgrading a half dozen I-5 interchanges to the north and south of the crossing.
All of that work totals up to an estimated $6 billion, and the project team plans to split the bill between Washington, Oregon, the federal government and tolls from drivers. The two states have already put in about $200 million combined and pledged another $1 billion apiece, and the team expects tolling to bring in a little over $1.2 billion.
That leaves about $2.5 billion that needs to come from federal sources, and the IBR team hopes to assemble that total primarily from the Mega grant and two other big federal funding programs: the Federal Highway Administration's Bridge Investment Program and the Federal Transit Administration's Capital Investment Grants New Starts program.
The Bridge Investment Program is another product of the 2021 infrastructure law, handing out a total of $9.62 billion across fiscal years 2022 through 2026 to large-scale projects that replace or rehabilitate existing bridges nationwide.
Washington and Oregon lawmakers had a hand in the creation of both it and the Mega program — the 2021 infrastructure bill incorporated earlier legislation co-authored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Patty Murray (D-WA) to create the Bridge Investment Program, and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) wrote the Mega grant portion of the package.
IBR got a $1 million grant from the Bridge Investment Program in 2022 for planning purposes, but missed out on a requested $750 million for construction, according to a project finance plan published in April 2023. The IBR team confirmed this week that it reapplied this year with a bigger request: $1.5 billion.
The Capital Investment Grants program is aimed at public transportation projects, and the IBR team is making the case that the replacement Interstate Bridge qualifies because it includes a light rail extension to Vancouver. C-Tran and TriMet have gotten CIG grants in the past decade for the Vine bus lines, the Division FX2 line and the MAX Red Line upgrade.
The IBR team hopes to land between $900 million and $1.1 billion from the CIG program, which would be a much bigger award than any of the recent Portland-area projects got, but it's not unheard of for the region. TriMet got $745 million in CIG funding for the MAX Orange Line in 2012, and the Columbia River Crossing — the previous attempt to replace the Interstate Bridge — was on track to receive $850 million in CIG funding before the project fell apart in 2013.
What happens next?
The Mega grant news is likely the final word on that particular federal funding source; the IBR team told KGW earlier this month that it didn't plan to apply to the Mega program again unless it missed out on funding altogether in 2023.
The next big round of financial news will probably be the 2023 Bridge Investment Program grant announcements. There isn't an exact date for that, but it will likely come fairly soon after the Mega grant news — the fiscal year 2022 awards for large bridge projects were announced in early January 2023.
The Capital Investment Grant application process is much longer, stretching across multiple years and into the project's construction phase. The IBR team doesn't plan to begin that process until the summer of 2024, according to its finance plan, after the other two major grants have been announced.
The finance plan states that the estimated $1 billion CIG request assumes that the Mega and Bridge Investment programs will ultimately provide the project with a combined $1.5 billion. If either grant falls short, "the upper end of the (Capital Investment Grant request) would likely need to increase," the plan states.