Project Sponsors Council conducts joint work session with local agency staff on April 23
VANCOUVER – The Columbia River Crossing Project Sponsors Council will hold a public work session with local partner agency staff at its April 23 meeting. The work session will be held 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Southwest Region office of the Washington State Department of Transportation, 11018 NE 51st Circle, in Vancouver.
The work session includes staff representatives designated by the Project Sponsors Council members, the Ports of Vancouver and Portland, and the CRC. Local staff is working to address design and engineering questions about the project raised by Project Sponsors Council members.
At Friday’s work session, members will report on their collaborative work efforts and their work plan for the rest of the summer. Discussion topics include updates on the design of interchanges on Hayden Island and in Vancouver, traffic modeling, performance measures and ways to manage traffic.
The Project Sponsors Council is composed of representatives from the Oregon and Washington departments of transportation, cities of Portland and Vancouver, Metro, Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council, TriMet, and C-TRAN, as well as two citizens who serve as co-chairs for the group. The governors of Oregon and Washington charged the Project Sponsors Council with advising the project on completion of the Final Environmental Impact Statement, project design, project timeline, sustainable construction methods, consistency with greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and the financial plan.
7 responses to “CRC Wheels Keep Turning”
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche, let them eat cake. :)
Of course it rolls on. You didn’t expect that newly minted government bureaucrats would surrender their career opportunities without a fight, did you? The CRC project has already sucked up something like 65 million, with nothing much more than a bad idea to show for it. But it has provided ’employment’ for a large number of people.
I heard close to $100 million spent on planning and “process” for a badly-conceived project that should never be built.
We could have converted the railroad bridge to a lift span for that, and probably still have money left over.
As public relations campaigns go…and make no mistake, that is what the CRC process is…this effort must be one of the most expensive on record for a publicly funded project. And its right up there with “the New Coke” campaign when it comes to results. The question of a new bridge across the Columbia River should have been in the hands of the two MPOs from the start, not the DOTs.
I think Lenny has hit the nail on the head. The problem is not that a regional consensus is impossible, its that the agencies managing the project have had their own agenda. From its start ten years ago, the process has been managed to get “buy-in” for their preferred solution. Even the study area and “purpose and need” were chosen to foreclose consideration of many potential alternatives.
And that’s with Democrats in Salem and Olympia. :)
Just think what this process would be like if Dino Rossi and Kevin Mannix were in charge.
So who is in charge of starting a new process of formulating the right questions so that the answer will come out as something we can all at least tolerate?