Roadblocks Begin to Pile Up for Stimulus Plans

Even shovel ready projects are getting delayed

North Middleton Township, Pa. — On a warm afternoon last month, a week before the stimulus bill became law, Vice President Joseph Biden strolled out onto a narrow, 79-year-old bridge over the Conodoguinet Creek. He poked his shoe through a hole in a rotting girder, tore off a piece of rusty metal, and examined a crack in the concrete deck.

“Is this a shovel-ready project?” Mr. Biden asked Scott Christie, the state transportation official charged with deploying economic-stimulus money.

“It’s ready to go,” Mr. Christie answered. “I literally have the plans in the car right now.”

It turns out, though, that shovel-readiness is in the eye of the beholder. Soon after his visit, Mr. Biden found out that his model stimulus project wouldn’t see a shovel for almost four more months, possibly longer, knowing how such timetables slip. In North Middleton, a White House eager for action had run up against locals eager to avoid disruption. The locals won.

States are quickly assembling their construction wish lists. But it takes time to advertise for contractors, collect bids, check the numbers, pick a winner and get work underway. A typical paving project — easy roadwork — takes close to three months from the time the money is approved to the arrival of work boots on the ground, according to the American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials. “It is not an instant process,” says a spokesman.

President Barack Obama and Mr. Biden know their unprecedented $787 billion emergency spending package has to put hard hats on America’s streets soon — or their administration risks losing credibility. On March 3, the president announced the release of the first $28 billion for road and bridge projects. A New Dealish logo to identify construction financed with stimulus money is ready.

Last month, even before the bill became law, Mr. Biden turned to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell to find the perfect illustration of just how fast the money could produce results.

Mr. Rendell was happy to oblige. Every two weeks he receives a confidential report from Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor listing factory start-ups and jobs created, alongside plant closings and layoffs. One of the latest reports lists 2,941 positions lost, and 1,143 created. “I’m almost scared to open them,” Gov. Rendell says.

To help Mr. Biden, the governor asked his Department of Transportation to come up with a list of projects. Mr. Christie had some paving in mind. But the Route 34 bridge, which had been on the state’s to-do list for more than a decade, had infrastructural sex appeal. Road resurfacing just isn’t “as glamorous as seeing a hole in a bridge,” says Mr. Christie.

North Middleton, with a population of less than 12,000, is a bedroom community for Harrisburg and Carlisle. The bridge is a key corridor for commuters and an important access way for the North Middleton Volunteer Fire Co., whose main station is about 1,000 feet from the bridge.

Mr. Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Feb. 11. Security agents closed the bridge to traffic before his motorcade arrived.

“What are you going to show me that we’re going to be using the stimulus money for?” Mr. Biden asked Mr. Christie that day.

Link for chart

“I’ve got a great example of a bad bridge,” Mr. Christie responded.

The state lists the bridge as “fracture critical,” meaning that if one of the two metal support girders broke, the entire structure would collapse. The green-painted girders are perforated with rust, the deck buckled with cracks. Putting up a new bridge would cost about $1.8 million and generate 50 to 60 jobs, according to state estimates.

On the bridge, Messrs. Christie and Rendell told Mr. Biden that they expected to start demolition in April.

From their yellow ranch home — the first house on the north side of the bridge — Creedin Cornman, 84 years old, and his wife, Reba, 77, noticed the commotion. Mr. Cornman remembers a rainy night in the 1960s, when he fish-tailed his International Scout and hit one of the girders. The door flew open and his poodle escaped. “I left my mark on that bridge,” Mr. Cornman recalls with a hint of pride. (The poodle was fine).

The stimulus package “sounds good,” says Mr. Cornman. “You have to start somewhere.”

Mrs. Cornman isn’t so sure. “I don’t know — it’s a lot of money,” she says.

On the day of Mr. Biden’s visit, Chester “Chet” Schlusser, 76, watched from the bed of his pickup truck while a Secret Service agent kept watch on his yard. The day before, the state had written Mr. Schlusser a letter offering him $8,200 for a sliver of his property to make room for the new bridge. The government included a blue brochure titled, “When Your Land is Needed for Transportation Purposes.” Mr. Schlusser says he’s inclined to sell the parcel.

He worked in bridge construction for 10 years, and, stimulus or not, doubts the project will get going quickly. “People aren’t geared up to start on a moment’s notice,” he says.

On Feb. 18, the day after Mr. Obama signed the stimulus bill into law, a Biden aide called the state’s Department of Transportation to see when the ground-breaking would take place.

But April wasn’t looking likely. Unbeknownst to the officials gathered on the bridge, at a public meeting on the project the previous summer, the head of school transportation had requested that construction not overlap with more than one school year. Two bus routes for the local high school crossed the bridge, and the school district wanted to minimize the disruption that a long detour would cause. The only way to make that work was to begin construction after school let out on June 10.

The state agreed to add language to the construction contract pushing back the start date. It plans to seek bids early next month, open them on April 30, review them for a few weeks and issue a “notice to proceed” by early to mid-June. Work could then commence on the site and be completed by year’s end.

“To do it much sooner would be to go against what we’ve been trying to do all along, which is hold it to a single school season,” says Timothy Bolden, of Gibson-Thomas Engineering Co., the new bridge’s designer.

News that construction would have to wait for months came as a shock to the White House.

“The vice president was impatient,” says a senior White House official. “He wanted it done.”

At a White House event on Feb. 23, Mr. Biden brought up the delay with Mr. Rendell. The governor, unaware of the school issue, reassured the vice president that the project was on track.

“America didn’t get in this mess overnight, and the cannot turn it all around overnight,” says Annie Tomasini, a Biden spokeswoman. “But we are moving forward with unprecedented speed.”

On Feb. 27, Messrs. Biden and Rendell met again on the sidelines of an event in Philadelphia. This time, Mr. Rendell confirmed that construction wouldn’t begin until late June.

“If we want to be smackers and make sure stimulus rolls over everything, we could have started it in April,” says Mr. Rendell. “We acceded to the request of the school district.”

Still, he says, “I wish it hadn’t been the bridge the vice president walked on.”