Star Tribune - Two St. Croix River Bridge Plans Follow Far Different Approaches

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By: Kevin Giles and Jim Anderson

They both involve the St. Croix River, but that's where the similarities seemingly end.

Only five miles separate the proposed St. Croix River Crossing Project and the existing Interstate 94 bridge at Hudson, Wis., which would make them the closest of seven spans joining Minnesota and Wisconsin.

In terms of transit planning, however, they are worlds apart.

"What you have are two different groups looking at their own piece of the transportation puzzle in the east metro," said Ted Schoenecker, a Washington County transportation engineer.

That lack of coordination between the two planning efforts is a concern to some.

"They're competing for the same user," said Bill Neuendorf of Transit for Livable Communities, a state organization with offices in St. Paul. "When you put those choices five miles away from each other and then put that kind of a price tag on two redundant bridges, you have to ask if that's a strong enough regional priority that should be subsidized by regional taxpayers."

The Gateway Corridor -- the stretch of I-94 from St. Paul to the highway's bridge at Hudson, Wis. -- might one day include an array of transit services, Schoenecker said. Cities and counties along the corridor have commissioned a regional study to determine ridership and costs for buses and trains.

By comparison, the St. Croix River Crossing bridge that would replace the 80-year-old Stillwater Lift Bridge has been debated for decades but, as currently planned, would have no public transit except for a bicycle loop trail.

The proposed St. Croix Crossing bridge at Oak Park Heights is "an old-school suburban highway" out of step with modern needs, said John Bailey, a policy director of the transit group Envision Minnesota. "I think what we're seeing from many proponents of the St. Croix Crossing is a solution for the 1960s, where the Gateway Corridor is really a 21st-century solution for transit."

As the proposed St. Croix Crossing bridge and the Gateway Corridor project move ahead in their separate orbits, the question of how far taxpayer money will stretch looms larger in public debate.

The existing six-lane I-94 bridge at Hudson, which carries 90,000 vehicles daily, is a key component of a transit corridor that someday could extend all the way east to Eau Claire, Wis. The proposed St. Croix Crossing bridge, projected to cost about $690 million, would serve a smaller market area between the Oak Park Heights-Stillwater area and New Richmond, Wis., a distance of about 17 miles.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., whose district includes several cities along Hwy. 36 from Mahtomedi to Roseville, said "a plan guaranteed to choke Hwy. 36 with congestion" lacks vision.

"It's time to be honest about the trade-offs involved in this $700 million project," she said. "Minnesota has limited transportation funds. Every extra dollar spent on a St. Croix 'mega-bridge' is a dollar not spent on rebuilding or repairing another Minnesota community's bridge or critical infrastructure."

But Gary Kriesel, one of the leading supporters of a new bridge, said developing public transit along the highway leading to the river will be critical to relieve traffic congestion. Kriesel, chairman of the Washington County Board, said he wants discussions with other political leaders, including McCollum, to make that happen. Even if Bus Rapid Transit or other forms of public transit never cross the new bridge, he said, they could start at Stillwater and Oak Park Heights and proceed west along Hwy. 36.

"I want to ratchet up that discussion big-time," he said.

In an era of tight government budgets, it's wasteful to build a bridge that doesn't serve multiple purposes, said William Schroeer, of St. Paul, who is policy and research director for Smart Growth America, a nonprofit group that advocates sound economic development strategy.

"In this era of $4- and $5-a-gallon gas, to spend money on a bridge that only cars can use -- that doesn't make sense," he said.

Prospects for public transit on the proposed St. Croix bridge fizzled in June 2008 when a multi-agency study concluded that northern St. Croix County lacked the population density to support buses or trains. Only the I-94 corridor through Hudson had "the most potential as a long-term sustainable transit market," the study concluded.

In April, the Gateway Corridor Commission passed a resolution of support for the St. Croix Crossing Project to lend weight to bills in Congress that would allow construction of the bridge. The lone dissenting commission vote was cast by Maplewood Mayor Will Rossbach, who questioned the connection between the Gateway goals and those for the St. Croix Crossing, given the crossing's lack of public transit.

The two planning efforts are on very different timelines, said Lisa Weik, chairwoman of the Gateway group who also represents Woodbury on the Washington County Board. And although their funding mechanisms vary, that doesn't preclude cooperative efforts in the future, she said.

With no decision yet by Congress on whether to grant an exemption from federal law to build a new St. Croix bridge, and with the project's long stop-and-go history, "we don't want to get too far down the road," Weik said.

Neuendorf said the proposed bridge was designed with a mid-1990s mentality that's already outdated. "That was the era of the Hummer," he said.

"In 1995 gas was [$1.15] a gallon. In my view we live in an era of hybrids and fuel conservation. Everyone is watching their pennies."

Smart Growth wants to improve the nation's deteriorating infrastructure before adding new roads and bridges. More investment in public transportation, the group said, will create 31 percent more jobs per dollar than building highways.

And while the Lift Bridge is structurally deficient, 1,149 other bridges in Minnesota are in the same situation, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The two busiest structurally deficient bridges are both on Interstate 35E in Ramsey County north of downtown St. Paul: spans crossing Pennsylvania Avenue and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway tracks. Those bridges carry 150,000 vehicles a day, compared with 18,000 on the Stillwater Lift Bridge.

Transit ridership, meanwhile, has jumped metrowide, said Carl Jensen, a MnDOT transit project manager. Public interest in transit, he said, often grows from traffic congestion. "The more people you have on the road, the more people you have interested in transit and taking advantage of it."

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