The San Benito County Board of Supervisors listened and gave its
support to the selected alternative of the Union Road Bridge
project by telling the engineers to
”
get to work
”
during Tuesday’s meeting.
The San Benito County Board of Supervisors this week listened and gave its support to the selected alternative of the Union Road Bridge project by telling the engineers to “get to work” during Tuesday’s meeting.
Biggs and Cardosa Associates, Inc. was given the task in December of 2008 to undergo the project and remain on schedule to have the bridge constructed by 2012. The bridge’s design is halfway through phase 2 and is expected to begin construction in 2011.
The bridge’s final design will be presented later this year in October.
The alternative presented Tuesday would cut south of the current bridge placement and would extend San Benito Street by about 150 feet, Project Manager Mahvash Harms said Tuesday. The 120-foot bridge would cost $19.54 million but the county would need to cover only 11 percent – the rest is funded through federal funds.
The alternative was chosen because it would cause the least harm to homes in the area, be cost effective and adhere to federal and state requirements – allowing the bridge to receive federal money.
The selected alternative also would prevent staged construction that would effectively shut down the Union Road and San Benito Street intersection.
The plans call for the bridge to connect with the west and east side of current Union Road and would move the intersection south – connecting with the new roadway. The extended San Benito Street would leave remnants of the old Union Road on the land.
The road would be used as access points to housing and commercial buildings already in the area, Public Works Director Steve Wittry said.
The old roads are expected to be sold to the landowners.
The old bridge is scour, or water erosion, critical and its failure is imminent, Wittry said. The bridge, built in 1959, is a 32-inch wide road that needs an upgrade.
The new bridge would extend the width of the bridge to two lanes plus a left-hand turn lane, but it won’t be four lanes despite the county’s plans to eventually extend Union Road an additional two lanes.
The bridge also will have a sidewalk for pedestrians and a bike lane.
Designs leave open the possibility of future extension, Harms said.
Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz asked whether it was cheaper to wait until the road was changed to four lanes instead of building a two-lane bridge and extending it later.
But the old bridge wouldn’t last that long, Wittry said.
Supervisor Anthony Botelho was surprised that the bridge wasn’t planned for four lanes with the county’s future plans. The Union Road extension was postponed on the county’s traffic plan last week to cut the county’s traffic fees in half.
“I just find it ironic that this is a two-lane bridge and one of the things was a Union Road extension,” Botelho said.
It wouldn’t have mattered because it was in future plans, not current ones, Wittry responded.
“We had to design the bridge on the conditions of what we have now – not future ones,” he said.
Another issue that engineers worried about was the possible creep because of the fault line that runs underneath the bridge, Harms said.
The bridge overlooks the San Benito River bed, which helps prevents flooding into the city, but in the riverbed is a fault line that engineers expect will cause the new bridge to move seven to 10 feet over its 70-year lifetime.
Using a hinge on the fourth span of the bridge would allow engineers to expand the bridge when the fault line causes a change, Harms said. Doing so would prevent the bridge from becoming faulty.
The next step for the bridge will be to complete the designs that are expected in October. Afterward, an environmental report will be completed by next February and construction will begin by August 2011.
