City continues grappling with bridge height

After city officials where told that its permit would be withheld pending a redesign of the east Winterberry bridge, Capt. Greg Shapley, regional director of the Coast Guard's bridge program, said that an increase of 6 inches — which city official fear could quadruple the cost of the project and render adjacent properties inaccessible — is not necessarily what they are looking for, but that current plans simply won't fly.

"We doubt very much that the existing bridge would be deemed adequate and that's based on some of the comments of the neighbors to our staff," he said. During a survey the agency conducted in the neighboring community, Shapley said residents reported near collisions with the span and were often forced to take down their masts and windshields.

However, 6 inches was merely speculation at the meeting attended by Shapley, his staff, city officials and their consultants, he said.

"We're not looking to put some behemoth bridge in an upscale neighborhood at a high cost to the city or negative impact to the residents," he said.

Bridges can be viewed as navigational obstruction, he continued, and "we're looking for something in the middle, not an extreme."

A concrete recommendation will come shortly after a survey is completed this month that will evaluate the waterway and mast heights of the vessels regularly navigating under the bridge, Shapley said.

"My staff ... (hasn't) gotten any paperwork or done any measuring of the boats," he continued. "It's just their opinion that the type of vessels on the waterway ... would most likely result in the raising of the bridge."

Plans for the bridge currently include a height increase of 1 inch, and city officials contend that complying with the Coast Guard's demand could push the cost of the project from $4 million to $20 million and require purchasing existing properties adjacent to the bridge, three of which have homes on them.

"It may render those properties inaccessible and in doing so we may have to purchase them," said Tim Pinter, the city's senior project manager.

Potentially, those homes could be razed.

"If we have to purchase those properties — the city's not in the business of owning homes," Pinter said.

Construction of the span should already be underway, Pinter said, and the Coast Guard's request has probably pushed the start date back as far as April 2007 — providing that the city could continue with the shorter permitting process it had counted on.

Starting in spring of next year, however, "depends, of course, on whether or not we have to redesign the bridge," Pinter said. "If we have to go back and redesign ... there will be delay costs and increased construction costs, so all that stuff has to be factored into the equation."

If a redesign is required, city staff may be required to undergo a permitting process that could take up to a year to complete, pushing the completion date far past it's expected time frame into spring of 2008.

"I really can't imagine that this situation is going to require something at that level," Shapley said. "As we explained to the city during the meeting, we probably could have been done with the entire process by now."

The aged bridge was badly impacted by Hurricane Wilma and deemed "structurally deficient" by the Florida Department of Transportation in its post-storm evaluation.

Heeding that agency's recommendation, city officials closed the bridge to commercial traffic.

The city will host a public hearing at 6 p.m. July 19 at Mackle Park to discuss this problem with residents who will be impacted by the Coast Guard's changes. Citizens will have 30 days to submit written comments, Pinter said.

"That may or may not affect what the Coast Guard will continue to ask us to do in the process," he continued. "If citizens don't want it, the Coast Guard has the ability to provide us with a quicker approval process."

Shapley, despite these objections, is still unsympathetic to the city's dilemma.

"We're not engineers here in Miami," he said. "But I can tell you in my experience ... only to discover with the passage of time and a little bit of effort that it would be do-able and nowhere near the cost that was projected. We're hopeful that this can be done at a minimum of expense to the city."