toledoblade.com --

Toledoans will only be allowed to drive on half of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Bridge this summer, but they may be able to eat lunch on the rest.

City officials yesterday said they have abandoned consideration of trying to finish replacing the King's drawspans during the shipping season. That means when the bridge opens to traffic, possibly on Monday, it will remain restricted to one lane each way until next winter.

To make some degree of lemonade out of that lemon, Mayor Carty Finkbeiner yesterday said the city would place sidewalk-cafe style tables and chairs on portions of the bridge idled by the unfinished work but not actually involved in it.

"We might even get a hot-dog cart up there," Mr. Finkbeiner said during a report he gave at the end of a news conference held to outline the city's tentative Marina District agreement with developer Larry Dillin.

"We're going to take advan-tage of the space we have while the traffic's slowed down," the mayor said.

Big concrete flower planters can be placed between the tables and active traffic lanes as a safety buffer, Robert Reinbolt, the mayor's chief of staff, said afterward. He was not so sure about the hot-dog vendor, proposing instead that most bridge diners would bring a brown-bag lunch or carry-out food from nearby restaurants.

City leaders have been discussing the temporary cafe-style bridge set-up on a conceptual level, but they offered no formal plans for it yesterday.

Councilman Mike Craig, whose district includes East Toledo, said the mayor's idea of turning the bridge into a ad-hoc food court was creative. But he was skeptical about its appeal to people.

"It sounds like a good idea, but we have a hard time getting people to walk anywhere in town," Mr. Craig said.

Originally, city officials planned to completely replace the King's drawspans, using four prefabricated leaves, between Jan. 1 and March 15, and expected contractor National Engineering to do so without closing the bridge to traffic for any period longer than four days.

But construction problems caused that timetable's abandonment by late January, and an initial goal of closing the bridge to vehicles for just 18 days foundered when crumbling concrete was found inside the bridge's structure and had to be replaced.

Then weather-related trouble, including a snowstorm, extreme cold, and ice jams and high water on the Maumee River, kept National Engineering from installing all four sections even though the bridge was kept closed to marine traffic past a March 15 deadline established in a U.S. Coast Guard permit.

Instead, only two sections are in place, with installation of the second section under way since March 19. The two sections comprise the eventual eastbound lanes, but until the bridge is finished they will host the two-way traffic.

The city has avoided a $20,000 per day Coast Guard fine for missing the March 15 deadline only because no commercial vessels have requested to use the Maumee River through the bridge since then. The first ship is expected to come up the river tomorrow morning, with David Welch, the commissioner of streets, bridges, and harbor, promising that the bridge will be ready for it.

Mr. Welch said concrete poured Monday on the King will take about seven days to cure, which makes next Monday the most likely date for reopening the bridge to vehicles. Mr. Finkbeiner echoed that forecast.

Before its Jan. 30 closing, the King bridge had been restricted to one lane each way almost continuously since October, 2001, first for renovation of the structure's concrete-arch approach spans, then for the drawspan replacement project itself.

Mr. Craig said the impact of continuing lane restrictions on the King bridge will be blunted this summer when the I-280 Veterans' Glass City Skyway opens, at which point I-280's existing Craig Memorial Bridge will become a local river crossing. But that won't make the King situation any less painful before then, he said.

"This bridge project has really hurt business in East Toledo," Mr. Craig said.

Tom Cousino, the owner of Cousino's Navy Bistro and other restaurants in The Docks complex at International Park, said he'll believe the bridge's reopening when he sees it but isn't surprised that the project won't be completed until next winter.

"It disappoints me, absolutely nauseates me, but beyond that, it doesn't surprise me," the restaurateur said. The bridge project has "been such a comedy of errors that you just have to laugh."

The Ohio Department of Transportation's current estimate for opening the new I-280 bridge is June 22.

A week ago, city officials said they hoped to finish the King bridge drawspan installation this spring or summer, too, but Mr. Reinbolt explained yesterday that arrangements to work on the spans during the shipping season were proving to be too complicated.

City officials decided over the weekend, he said, that it would be wiser to simply postpone the remaining work until January rather than maintain the potentially futile hope that a suspension of river traffic could be negotiated with the Coast Guard during the shipping season.

Lt. Rick Minnich, a spokesman for the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office in Toledo, said the city was advised last week that it was "unlikely that they'd have a window of opportunity to install the next two spans during the shipping season, since they would need a couple of two-week closures to accomplish that work."

Furthermore, Mr. Reinbolt said, the heavy-lift equipment that has been used to install two of four replacement drawspan sections on the bridge since January is booked elsewhere for the spring and summer.

While National Engineering had identified other heavy-lift equipment that might be brought to the King bridge sooner than next winter, Mr. Reinbolt said it appeared that it might not arrive before late summer or early fall, when river shipping gets busy for harvest season.

Lieutenant Minnich said it had been unlikely that the city would have gotten permission to close the river at any time during the shipping season even with substitute heavy-lift equipment, "but I guess it's a moot point now."

"We didn't get a request from them, but I think that's because they knew what the answer was going to be," he said.

Still to be determined, Mr. Reinbolt said, is how much additional cost will be associated with National shutting down the project site until next winter, then remobilizing - and who will foot the extra bill.

It's likely to end up part of a pending city lawsuit against National and engineering consultant HNTB over previous construction delays, including a one-year postponement incurred because of an error in preliminary drawings for the replacement spans. Delays already have pushed the project's original $32.3 million contract amount up by $4.44 million.

Contact David Patch at:
dpatch@theblade.com
or 419-724-6094.

Permanent Link