EASTON — Transportation officials across Pennsylvania will have their eyes on Northampton County over the next few years as it begins a groundbreaking project to replace or repair more than a quarter of its bridges.
Within the next month or so, the county’s General Purpose Authority is expected to award a Private-Public Partnership, or P3, contract to address 33 structurally deficient bridges. Under the program, the first of its kind among local governments in Pennsylvania, the bridges will be replaced in record time while locking in the county’s costs.
Normally when government entities begin large capital projects, they need to individually hire a group of experts — architects, engineers, contractors — and oversee the construction process. While they’re rarely the ones performing the work on these projects, governments usually wind up footing the bill if one is delayed or encounters cost overruns.
P3 projects break that mold. Rather than have government entities assemble their own team of experts, experts submit bids for the entire project as a group. The team awarded the contract is then on the hook to finish the job as advertised. Any overruns will come out of the experts’ pockets, not the county’s.
“We want stuff done on time for what we budgeted. We hate ‘change orders’ beyond our control,” said Stan Rugis, Northampton County’s director of public works.
Pennsylvania approved the P3 method with bipartisan support when Gov. Tom Corbett signed it into law in 2012. Still, the model hasn’t exactly caught on. Only the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission have rolled out P3 projects, and at much larger scales than Northampton County.
Mike Bonini, the director of PennDOT’s P3 project, said the state is in the middle of a $899 million project to replace 558 bridges. More traditional methods would take PennDOT 10 years to replace so many bridges, but Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners, the firm that received the PennDOT contract, is expected to finish by August 2018.
It’s unclear if the state will see any financial savings from the project, Bonini said. If there are any, it will be because Plenary Walsh will be responsible for maintaining the bridges’ structural integrity for the next 25 years. Northampton County has a similar maintenance plan that will require its winning bidder to maintain each of its 33 bridges for 10 years.
Northampton County is still vetting the bridge proposals it received from vendors, but Executive John Brown estimated in February the entire project would cost the county about $40 million. In his pitch to Northampton County Council, Brown said the P3 method would be about 30 percent cheaper than the normal process. Bundling the bridges together would create efficiencies in the design process, he said.
The P3 model is being used in other places across the country, but its success record has been mixed, said Emily Han, a P3 policy expert for the Eno Center for Transportation, a transportation think-tank based out of Washington, D.C. In order for the P3s to work well, governments need to dive into the details and divvy up who is accountable for different scenarios that may delay work or damage infrastructure. The key is having a staff capable of handling the contract negotiations and vetting process, Han said.
“They need to make sure they have any situation covered where its very clear which risks are assigned to the public sector and the private sector,” she said.
She and Bonini said in most cases, the P3s are being used to address expensive projects involving a single piece of infrastructure, such as the construction on the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York. Pennsylvania is unusual in that it’s the only state that’s bundling smaller projects together for added efficiency, and other states are taking notice.
“We are hearing from a lot of states — Massachusetts, New York — that are really interested in what we’re doing and whether they could consider it a model to address their structurally deficient bridges,” Bonini said.
In the same way, Northampton County is blazing the path for local governments, Bonini said. Crumbling infrastructure is a widespread problem at every level of government in the nation, and if it’s successful, Northampton County could serve as an example on how to approach projects on a smaller scale. While none of its 115 bridges compares to the Tappan Zee, its spans across local small creeks and rivers are similar to thousands of others across the Keystone State.
“All of the counties maintain a bridge inventory, and a large number of those are at the point of being structurally deficient,” Bonini said. “Not only are other states looking at Pennsylvania, other counties are looking at Northampton County.”
It can be slow work for Pennsylvania counties to replace their bridges. Northampton County routinely applied for state aid on bridge work through a program called the Transportation Improvement Program, but the competition is fierce. The county only received funding for one project in the past 20 years, Rugis said.
Even when financing isn’t an issue, coordinating the work has been a strain on the county, Brown said in February. Brown said the county doesn’t have enough experts on staff to oversee the 19 bridges under construction through a 2013 bond, and hiring more staff would cost about $1 million. The P3 project puts those responsibilities on the contractor and gets the work done faster than the county could on its own.
The work is also critically important to the region’s growth, according to Becky Bradley, the executive director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission. In the past decade, the Lehigh Valley has emerged as a key warehouse and logistics location due to its proximity to major highways and cities. That growth is bringing more people, cars and trucks into the region and putting more stress on local infrastructure. Forward thinking like this not only helps local traffic patterns but promotes future growth, she said.
“Northampton County is in a position to be a national leader, potentially an international leader, in transportation financing. That’s a really big deal,” Bradley said.
QUICK FACTS
They’re faster: Since the private sector doesn’t have to seek low bids, contractors can speed up the construction process by weeks.
They mitigate risk: If structural problems pop up a few years after construction is completed, it’s the contractor and not the government that pays for repairs.
P3 Projects vs. Traditional Projects
Northampton County is on track to become the first county government in Pennsylvania to begin a Public-Private Partnership, or P3, project to repair or replace 33 bridges.
Where are bridges being fixed?
Northampton County is about to replace 33 bridges, more than a quarter of its 115 spans. Here are some notable bridges being replaced or rehabilitated.
* Meadows Road Bridge over Saucon Creek in Lower Saucon Township
* Flicksville Road Bridge over Martins Creek in Washington Township
* Willow Brook Road Bridge over Catasauqua Creek in Allen Township
* Bushkill Street Bridge over Bushkill Creek on the Tatamy-Palmer Township border
* Hanoverville Road Bridge over the Monocacy Creek in Lower Nazareth Township
